Aztec Fire

  “You have a dead man’s carriage?”

  “I have my carriage. And I made the trip from the capital to here in haste after receiving your message. I bought fresh mules on the way.”

  “I take it the carriage owner—late owner—had a stash of dinero on board?”

  Luis grinned. “Enough to keep me in mules and cards and women, but now I am broke. So, tell me, what are we doing in Taxco? Is there a mint here we are going to rob? A rich widow who desires a reading of the tarot?”

  “Maria.”

  “I was afraid you would say that. Is she with the rebel army or in prison?”

  We sat in his coach, smoked, and drank as I brought him up-to-date with Iturbide and Maria. And Madero’s agents.

  “Ahhh, a man who cheated death,” he said, about Gomez.

  “Not for long. I’ve been watching him and the two men I’ve been able to identify as Madero’s agents. They stay away from him. He’s a pariah, probably because Maria and I got away. He spends his time eating and drinking and fucking.”

  “The best time to attack a man is when his pants are down, eh, amigo? But it would be sacrilegious to kill a man when he’s with a puta. The rule is that you wait until he’s finished and has paid the girl—before you kill him.”

  “I agree that going after him with his pants down is best. But I don’t want him to go to hell with a smile on his face. I have another plan.”

  HUNDRED EIGHT

  I WAITED OUTSIDE the pulquería while Gomez gorged himself on frijoles, tortillas, and hot peppers, washing it down with pulque. Hour after hour he gluttonized. A call of nature should have been required at some point. I couldn’t believe that this bastardo took so damn long to come to the outhouse behind the pulquería. Slovenly guttertrash that he was, he didn’t bother closing the door. He dropped his pants, flopped his naked ass over the hole, and gave a disgusting belch as he let loose frijoles from his other end.

  He frowned at me, trying to bring me into focus as I paused next to him and leaned down and touched something by him with my cigaro.

  As I walked away, he yelled, “What the hell you doing?”

  I mumbled something.

  “What?”

  I waited until I was at the corner of the building before I turned and yelled back: “Kiss your ass good-bye, you son of a whore. I lit a bomb fuse under your rear end.”

  I got one step around the corner before the outhouse blew.

  HUNDRED NINE

  A BAD PLAN,” Luis said. “It is only right that we rescue your love. Where is the justice when I am hanged for something noble instead of my splendid life of sin?”

  “Perhaps God will deem it payment due,” I suggested.

  “I have hid from God most of my life. Attracting His attention would be a strategic blunder.”

  He walked beside me as I positioned the donkey cart next to the cathedral. Night was falling, most of the town had closed down to attend a special cathedral service commemorating the death of a mine owner. The mule train with supplies for the store had arrived earlier, and the general store was still open—no doubt at the insistence of Madero’s men.

  They would be waiting for whoever picked up or inquired about the printer’s ink.

  Now I knew there were six of them … two in front, two inside the store, two in back of the store.

  General Luis’s fancy carriage was also waiting by the general store, parked across the street. Two of us. Six of them … and Maria caught in the cross fire.

  Ayyo … not a happy picture. I thought of eliminating a couple more men—Gomez was not the only one who had a call of nature—but that might arouse suspicion. Rumors had it that sewer gases had exploded and killed Gomez. An easy explanation for Madero’s men, who no doubt found the three-eyed derelict an embarrassment anyway.

  I was up the street near the cathedral when I saw the rider. A slender youth on a mule appeared on the street, heading for the store. A nice disguise. If I hadn’t traveled with Maria and turned her into a boy myself, I wouldn’t have recognized her.

  I gave the signal to Luis and headed for the carriage.

  The youth rode up to the store and tied the mule’s reins to the post ring in front.

  As she went into the store, I heard a whistle—Madero’s men in front signaling that the suspect had arrived.

  I set the fuse at the carriage and hurried to the back of the store.

  The explosion in front seemed to shake the whole world. Ayyo … perhaps I had put too much gunpowder in the carriage. The explosion of the donkey cart Luis set off near the church was lost in the bigger explosion.

  Luis had wanted to let the animals go up with the explosion but I had insisted that they be released before our grand display.

  Both explosions were more smoke bomb than blasts. The idea was to drive hundreds of people from the cathedral into a street full of smoke. Luis was to throw two hand bombs … carefully, so they didn’t hurt anyone. In other words, he was to create mass panic, diverting the two in front.

  The first man who approached me got off a shot but it went straight into the dirt—after which I killed him. Then I shot the other man. His pistol went off when he dropped it as he hit the ground.

  Luis was to take out the two in front, which left two inside the store.

  With Maria.

  And I didn’t have time to reload.

  I heard her scream—even as I was charging in with my machete.

  Maria was already battling Madero’s two men.

  Ayyo … this is why God gave indios knives. As one of the men swung around to face me, I gutted him, twisting the long blade. He stared at me in surprise and agony.

  He hadn’t bothered to draw his pistola to fight Maria. I pulled it now and using him as a shield, put a bullet in the middle of the other man’s chest.

  I had aimed for his heart, but the weapon was not accurate.

  Maria had kind words for me as I rushed her out the back.

  “Bastardo, it’s about time you came back.”

  Luis was waiting with the horses when we came out.

  We mounted, Luis tossing a canister bomb into the back of the store.

  “Just to keep them busy,” he said.

  The amount of smoke left people with the impression that the whole town was going up in flames. No doubt their fears were kindled by the fact that so many of the buildings were made of dry-rotted wood.

  We rode out of town, leaving frantic townsmen behind us fighting the “fire” they thought was raging as militia poured into the city to assist.

  No one noticed that three dangerous revolutionary “criminals” were escaping.

  HUNDRED TEN

  WE SEPARATED FROM Luis outside of town. He’d planned to return to the capital on horseback. He had wealthy widows and games of chance yet to conquer. Not to mention another carriage and title to acquire.

  Meanwhile I had other business.

  First with Maria.

  We didn’t speak until we were two miles out of town. We stopped and dismounted to let the horses rest.

  She stared at me, examining me as if she were staring at the face of a stranger. I saw questions, anger—at last relief on her face.

  “Maria,” I said, “I love you.”

  “Really?” she asked, her mouth curling with disdain. “Then why were you gone for so long?”

  “Maria, I traveled around the world—the whole world—to return to you. I never stopped thinking of you.”

  “Did you think I was going to wait for you? To spurn other men because you were lost somewhere in the world and might someday come back?”

  “Well … no, I didn’t … I—”

  “Of course I waited for you because I love you more than life itself.”

  She stepped to me and on tiptoes, kissed me.

  We came together as lovers long apart, bonded by love and our passions.

  PART XXIII

  BLACK INDIO

  HUNDRED ELEVEN

  GENERAL VICENTE GUERRE
RO crouched behind a rocky escarpment on the high stony hilltop.

  As usual, his guerrilla forces were outmanned, outnumbered, and outgunned. His only hope was to outthink his opposition—Lieutenant Colonel Moya and his infantry regiment, a full four hundred strong, which would be coming down the narrow valley slope before him.

  Moya’s regiment was on its way to join up with the Army of the South and its new commander, Colonel Iturbide.

  Guerrero had to outwit them. He had nothing else in his hand. For that, he needed a better view of his prospective battlefield.

  He had survived nearly ten years of warfare, half of that time as commander of the last major force to carry on the revolution, by understanding the terrain better than the enemy did.

  He already understood his opponent—Lieutenant Colonel Moya. A tenacious adversary, Guerrero had fought him before—and he had not defeated his regiment in the field, which did not particularly bother him. Guerrillas did not prevail through victory in the field. In their way of war, citizen “irregulars” prevailed against regular troops not in set-piece battles but an inch at a time—through the employment of hit-and-run, through the pillaging of supplies, the disruption of communications through the interdiction of couriers, and the targeted assassination of officers.

  The word “guerrilla” had been born when old Spain’s courageous common people changed the Art of War for all time, when they fought and eventually defeated an infinitely superior, unspeakably ruthless foe—Napoleon and his vast horde.

  During that mano a mano combat, the guerrilla tactic of firing a single musket shot … then cutting, running … was born. The tactic originated out of necessity. The guerrillas had only a single lead ball or two to give to each fighter, so the guerrilla had no other choice: He had no extra musket balls.

  Necessity proved to be more than the Mother of Invention and a viable strategy. It proved the path to ultimate victory: Even if one had many more musket balls, to stand and fight a hugely superior force was suicidally stupid, and in the case of the guerrillas, they were almost always outnumbered.

  Well, at least, the Spanish army he waited for would not catch him by surprise—surprise was his key weapon.

  The Spanish force was composed of 40 cavalry and 360 infantry. Guerrero arranged his ambush so scouts leading the way would not stumble onto his men. Moreover, most of his men were coming up behind the long line of Spanish troops. A smaller unit secreted in rocky terrain was to spring up and fire at the front column, then quickly retreat. When the mounted troops surged forward to chase, the guerrillas to the rear would attack.

  Staring out over his prospective battlefield, Guerrero remembered Xavier Mina, his hero and mentor. The Spanish guerrilla leader who—more than anyone—created the strategy that eventually drove out the French and for a time led the insurrection that promised to drive the Spaniards out of New Spain.

  To Guerrero’s eternal, inconsolable sorrow, Mina had died fighting for the rebel cause in the colony.

  Barely nineteen years old in 1808—when Napoleon grabbed Spain and the Spanish guerrilla movement rose to drive the French back over the Pyrenees—Mina had left the study of law and become a guerrilla leader under his uncle.

  Captured by the French in 1810, he spent four years in a prison. Released from prison, he joined the liberal movement confronting King Ferdinand who had reassumed the throne.

  Mina went to England, then to the United States where he organized a force of three hundred to invade New Spain in defense of the independence movement.

  After winning several battles—in one case against a Spanish force six times larger than his own unit—he was captured and summarily shot.

  Though he died at twenty-eight years old, he had experienced more of life than most people who lived three times longer.

  Vicente Guerrero understood that he, too, had been through the needle’s eye during his own thirty-eight years. A “black indio”—his mother was indio and his father had African and Spanish heritage—he had become a rebel leader despite the fact he had been a mule driver.

  Unlike the educated, worldly priests Hidalgo and Morelos who had led the rebellion before him, Guerrero was illiterate. But he made up his deficiency in book learning by having an instinct for military tactics. He had been fighting now for over ten years and had lost battles but not the war.

  He was aware of his weaknesses and understood part of his success was his knowledge of the terrain and knowledge of the inhabitants who could relate to both his black and indio heritage. He kept much of the rugged, rural region from Taxco to the beaches at Acapulco under his authority but was smart enough not to venture into open field combat or attempt to hold large cities.

  Iturbide, the new commander of the Army of the South, had a force of twenty-five hundred men, including four hundred very loyal troops from his old regiment of Celaya. Guerrero’s force was half that size and more than a match. But that only created a stalemate because if Guerrero attempted an outright victory, the viceroy could pour thousands of troops into the battle.

  Guerrero had proved many things about the strength of the peons of the colony, including the fact that the men and women of color and mixed blood were as strong and brave and intelligent as any Spaniard, that the test of purity of blood that determined one’s place in life was a lie and a perversion.

  He fought for the right of all people to have political, economic, and social rights regardless of their bloodlines.

  When the independence movement erupted and Father Hidalgo called for patriots to rise and fight the gachupines, Vicente’s father, Pedro, supported the Spanish side, believing that racial progress could come without revolt.

  When Vicente announced he was going to join the insurrection, father and son had a heated political argument in the family mule corral as Vicente packed a mule for the trip to the Bajio where Hidalgo was raising an army.

  Pedro first pleaded with Vicente and then disowned him, his only son, declaring that no family member should ever again talk with Vicente.

  Vicente, meanwhile, made his way up the Pacific Coast from Acapulco to join the revolt, gathering a force along the way with which to join the rebellion.

  Another rebel with a mixed racial background was the dark-skinned priest, Father José Morelos. Although Morelos and Hidalgo were both priests, they had very different backgrounds. Like Vicente, Morelos had earlier been a mixed-blood mule driver in the Acapulco region. His father was a carpenter. Although Morelos was registered at birth as pure-blooded Spanish to avoid the harsh laws discriminating against people of mixed blood, his mother’s racial roots included indio and africano.

  He had worked for years before attending seminary school and had nearly starved to death while getting schooling. In contrast, Hidalgo’s parents were pure-blooded criollos and hacienda owners.

  While Hidalgo raised a ragtag army that in spirit and goals resembled the Children’s Crusade as much as a military unit, Morelos learned how to fight from the way it was being done on the Iberian Peninsula—guerrilla warfare.

  Made a general by Hidalgo, Morelos went back to the rugged Acapulco region and launched a grassroots revolution while Hidalgo’s army met and were ultimately vanquished by the Spanish.

  Morelos assigned the twenty-seven-year-old Guerrero to serve under officer Hermenegildo Galeana, descendant of a sailor who left a British pirate ship and settled at San Jeronimo, a day’s walk up the coast from Acapulco.

  Father Hidalgo faced a firing squad in 1811. Morelos, entrenched in the Acapulco region, carried on the battle until he was captured and executed in 1815.

  For the past five years after Morelos’s death, Guerrero had kept the torch burning …

  HUNDRED TWELVE

  AT LAST, LIEUTENANT Colonel Moya’s force was entering the trap Guerrero set.

  When the front line of the Spanish cavalry and infantry were in musket shot, Guerrero gave the signal to open fire.

  After firing a round, he ordered a retreat. Seeing the backs of rebels,
the lead cavalry unit took up pursuit.

  When the quick moving cavalry separated from the militia infantry and gave chase, Guerrero raised his hand and whispered, “Now, amigos.”

  His trumpeter blew a signal and his second unit attacked the rear of the militia column, inflicting casualties and grabbing pack animals. As the mounted troops wheeled to go to the rear, ten men rose from another outcrop, fired, and retreated to delay the rescue.

  Their purpose was not to obliterate the regiment. For Guerrero one rebel wounded—as opposed to four royal troops killed and more wounded, compounded by the loss of the eight mules packing supplies in the course of a terrifying rout of Moya’s regiment—was a significant victory.

  One of the mules carried a cask of fine Spanish brandy intended for the new commander of the Army of the South. That night over a campfire dinner, Guerrero gave a mock salute to General Iturbide, who of course wasn’t present but who had supplied them with so much bounty and who had suffered another bitter loss at the hands of another one of Guerrero’s guerrilla units.

  “Muchas gracias, El General.”

  XXIV

  CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  HUNDRED THIRTEEN

  AY … SEÑOR ALCHEMIST, modesty is for widows and maidens.”

  Maria said that after I refused a commission as a colonel in the revolutionary army. I accepted the task of being the armaments master of the guerrilla force but refused the commission because I didn’t want to wear a uniform or learn even the minor military decorum practiced by the rebels.

  She accused me of not accepting a commission as an officer because it would be easier for me to escape royal forces if I was not wearing a uniform … and what could I say? The woman was a mind reader.

  Having experienced a world of knaves ranging from man-eating savages to avaricious sultans to pirate kings, I was cynical about just about everything except for my love for Maria and my desire to drive stakes through the hearts of the gachupines—I had not fought and thought my way around the entire world to come back and be the humble indio to gachupines who wiped their muddy boots on peons.