Wrath of God

I put her into the rear seat, climbed in next to him and he drove away.

The fifteen miles for which we stayed with the Huila road were no problem and took us about thirty minutes to cover, a remarkable performance considering the darkness and the state of the road.

It was when we reached the place where we were to turn off that we ran into difficulties. For one thing it took a good half-hour to find the start of the trail, so faintly was it marked. When we turned on to it, I knew we were in trouble.

It was almost impossible to see, even with the head-lamps full on and we seemed to be threading our way through a ghostly maze of thorn bushes and organ cactus. We kept this up for a while, crawling at five or ten miles an hour for most of the time and on two occasions it was only van Horne’s quick reflexes that prevented us from plunging into a dry arroyo.

In the end he braked to a halt, and switched off the engine and lights. ‘So you were right and I was wrong. I don’t even know if we’re on the trail any more. We’ll move on at first light.’

I turned and looked back at the girl. ‘Are you all right?’

She reached for my hand, pressed it gently. Van Horne said, ‘Now may I ask why in hell you had to bring her along? Can’t you do without it or something?’

‘The federales would have passed her from hand to hand.’

‘If it doesn’t happen to her here, it happens somewhere else,’ he said. ‘So what’s the point?’

‘Her mother’s people live on the other side of the mountains. They’ll take her in. Look after her properly. Yaquis have a strong kinship system. They wouldn’t turn her away.’

He was in the act of lighting one of his cigarillos and turned to look at me in surprise, the match flaring in his cupped hands. ‘Are you saying she’s Yaqui?’

‘Her mother was. Her father was straight out of the top drawer. One of the big landowning families.’

‘Son, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. She’s branded clean to the bone. Why the Yaquis are worse than the Apache and that’s going some, believe me. First night she doesn’t like you in bed, she’ll take a knife to your privates.’

‘My affair, not yours.’

‘It touches both of us while we’re together. You get rid of her the moment we break through to the other side, understand?’

‘We’ll see about that.’

‘We certainly will.’ And then, with one of those puzzling about-turns that I was to find so typical of the man, added, ‘It’s going to get a damn sight colder than this before morning. If she cares to lift up the back seat she’ll find some car rugs.’

He turned, as if suddenly exasperated and repeated the information in Spanish. The girl stood up and fumbled about in the darkness. After a while, she passed a heavy car rug over to me.

‘No, for you,’ I said.

Van Horne laughed uneasily. ‘She’s going to hang on to you like a leech, Keogh. You mark my words.’ He grabbed an end of the rug, unfolded it and spread it across our knees. ‘She should be snug enough back there. There are two more. On the other hand I don’t mind if you want to get under the covers with her.’

I think he was deliberately trying to bait me. I refused to be drawn, but turned and said to the girl, ‘Wrap up well and go to sleep. We’ll move on at first light.’

Van Horne switched on the dashboard light, found the bottle of tequila he had taken from the bar and uncorked it.

He took a long pull and sighed. ‘Heaven alone knows what this stuff does to the liver, but it’s all that’s going to get me through this night. You’d better have some.’

I took a mouthful, fought for breath as it burned its way down and handed the bottle back hurriedly. ‘I think old Tacho must have made that himself in the back room.’

‘I can believe that all right. I can believe anything of this damned country.’ He shivered. ‘God, if I had my time over again.’

‘Would anything be any different?’

The neck of the bottle chinked on his teeth, there was a gurgle, a long gurgle and then he sighed. ‘No, it’s a long dark night at the mouth of nowhere, Keogh, and we’re both far from home, so the truth for once.’

‘Which is …?’

‘The old, old question.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Would you believe me, Keogh, if I told you I spent four years in a seminary? That I actually trained for the priesthood?’

‘You certainly made a convincing enough job of it at Huerta this morning when they were executing those men.’

It was as if I had touched an open wound and he turned on me sharply. ‘They were dying, Keogh, they’d only minutes to live. They went easier thinking they’d had a priest. Whether they did or not doesn’t matter a damn where they are now.’

‘So you think they’ve gone to a happier place, do you?’

It was a stupid and ill-judged remark in the circumstances and received the reply it merited. ‘Don’t get clever with me, boy.’

‘All right, I’m sorry.’ He took another pull at the bottle and passed it to me. ‘What do you do when you’re not wearing a cassock?’

‘You might say I’m in the banking business.’ He laughed loudly and without the slightest sign of having taken drink in spite of the quantity he’d already put away. ‘Yes, I like that. You know I was once in a little town in Arkansas where the local police insisted on a permit if you owned a hand-gun and you had to state your reason for needing one.’

‘What did you put?’

‘I told them I often carried large sums of money. I didn’t say it was usually other people’s.’

‘I see – so you’re a thief.’

‘I rob banks, if that’s what you mean, and believe me you’ve got to be good to get away with it.’

‘Which is why you’re running round Mexico playing the earnest priest?’

‘That’s it exactly. I knocked over the National Bank at a little place called Brownsville in Texas two days ago all on my own. It’s a funny thing, but priests and nuns – everybody trusts them. I knocked on that door a half-hour before time and the guard opened it without a qualm.’

‘How many dead men did you leave behind you?’

‘Dead men.’ He seemed surprised. ‘I told you it was a nice, clean job. Four guys lying on their faces with their hands tied and an empty vault was all I left behind that day.’ He leaned forward as if trying to see my face. ‘Anyway, how many men have you killed, Keogh, that’s the question.’

He was right, but if I’d told him, I’d have given him the shock of his life. ‘One too many.’

‘It always is, even when you think you’ve got an excuse for it like you and your politics. We’re a lot alike, you and me, Keogh, in our different ways, and I’ll tell you why. We’ve both got death in the soul, it’s as simple as that.’

Which was probably the most terrible thing anyone had ever said to me, mainly because it was the kind of remark that brings out into the open a truth one has always attempted to avoid.

‘What was it you called it?’ van Horne said. ‘The last place God made. That about sums it up. My old lady would say I’d ended up with what I deserved. She and my father were Dutch. Moved to Vermont when he opened a little printing shop in Altoona. Her religion was everything to her. Believe me, boy, nobody takes it more seriously than Dutch Catholics. When I walked out of that seminary on account of a stupid little bitch, who left me six months later, my mother laid it straight on the line. The Wrath of God and the Day of Judgement rolled into one. That’s what I’m going to get and any time now the way things are going.’

He rambled on in this way for quite some time, not drunk and yet it was the drink talking. Finally, it started to rain in great, heavy cold drops that hurt where they made contact. We got out quickly and put the top up and only just in time for the rain soon increased into a persistent downpour.

‘My God, this is all we needed,’ van Horne said.

I wondered if he appreciated the seriousness of this new turn of events. That by morning, half the ground we had to traverse would be quagmire and a hundred dry arroyos rushing torrents and quite impassable.