the folder held. 'Oh,' he said in a different tone of voice. 'More of these babies.'
'More of them, you say?' Moss didn't know whether to feel alarmed or relieved. 'Other people have got 'em, too?'
'Hell, yes,' the military prosecutor answered. 'What, did you think you were the only one?' He didn't wait for Moss' reply, but threw back his head and laughed. 'You civilian lawyers think you're the most important guys in the world, and nothing is real unless it happens to you. Well, I've got news for you: you aren't the cream in God's coffee.'
'And you are-' But Jonathan Moss checked himself. He wanted information from Lopat, not a quarrel. 'All right, I'm not the only one, you say? Tell me more. Who else has got 'em? Who sends 'em? Have you had any luck catching the bastards? I guess not, or I wouldn't have got these.'
'Not as much as we'd like,' Lopat said, which was pretty obvious. 'We've torn apart the towns where they're postmarked, but not much luck. You can see for yourself-all the Canucks need is a typewriter and a pen, and they could do without the typewriter in a pinch. If it makes you feel better, there's never been a follow-up on one of these. Nobody's got shot or blown up the day after one of these little love notes came.'
'I'm not sorry to hear that,' Moss admitted. 'You didn't say who else got a-love note.' He nodded to Lopat, acknowledging the phrase.
'I don't have the whole list. Investigation isn't my department, you know. I go into court once they're caught-and then you do your damnedest to get 'em off the hook.' The military prosecutor leered at Moss, who stonily stared back. With a shrug, Lopat went on, 'Far as I know, the other people these have come to have all been part of the occupation apparatus one way or another. You're the first outside shyster to get one, or I think you are. Doesn't that make you proud?'
'At least,' Moss said dryly, and Lopat laughed. Moss tapped one of the notes with a fingernail. 'Prints?'
'We'll check, but the next ones we find'll be the first.'
'Yeah, I figured as much. You would have landed on these fellows like a bomb if you knew who they were,' Moss said. Lopat nodded. Something else occurred to Moss. 'You think this has anything to do with that telephone threat I got last year, where the guy told me not to start my auto or I'd be sorry?'
The military prosecutor frowned. 'I'd forgotten about that. I don't know what to tell you. Pretty damn funny, you know? You're the best friend-best American friend-the Canucks have got. You're married to one of theirs, and I know what she thinks of most Yanks, me included. You're the best occupation lawyer between Calgary and Toronto, anyway. Makes sense they'd want to get rid of me. I don't like it, but it makes sense. But why you? Seems to me they ought to put a bounty on anybody who even messes up your hair.'
'I've wondered about that, too. Maybe they're angrier at Laura for marrying me than they are at me for marrying her.'
'Maybe.' But Lopat didn't sound convinced. 'In that case, why aren't they trying to blow her up instead of you?'
'7 don't know,' Moss answered. 'As long as this isn't too much of a much, though, I won't lose any sleep over it.' He redonned his cold-weather gear. 'I'll see you in court, Major, and I'll whip you, too.'
'Ha!' Lopat said. 'You been smoking doped cigarettes, to get so cocky?'
After a few more good-natured insults, Moss left occupation headquarters. By then, a wan sun had come out. His long shadow stretched out to the northwest as he walked back to the building where he practiced.
He'd just set one foot on the steps leading up the sidewalk when the bomb went off behind him. Had he had an infantryman's reflexes, he would have thrown himself flat. Instead, he stood there frozen while glass blew out of windows all around and fell clinking and clattering to the ground like sharp-edged, glittering snowflakes.
Already, a great cloud of black smoke was rising into the sky. Looking over his shoulder, Moss realized it came from the direction of the building he'd just left. He started running, back in the direction from which he'd come. At every step, his shoes crunched on shattered glass. He bumped into a bleeding man running the other way. 'Sorry!' they both gasped. Each one kept going.
When Moss rounded the last corner, he came on a scene whose like he hadn't met since the days of the war. Occupation headquarters had had plenty of guards, but someone, somehow, had sneaked a bomb past them. The red brick building had fallen in on itself. Flames shot up from it. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay all around. Moss stepped on an arm that stopped abruptly, halfway between elbow and wrist. It still had on shirt sleeve and wristwatch. Blood dribbled from the end. His stomach lurched.
Here and there, survivors were staggering or pulling themselves out of the building. 'My God!' one of them-a woman secretary-said, over and over. 'My God! My God!' Maybe she was too stunned to say anything else. Maybe she couldn't find anything else that fit. She cradled a broken arm in her other hand, but hardly seemed to know she was hurt.
A hand sticking out from under bricks opened and closed. Moss dashed over and started clawing at the rubble. The soldier he pulled out was badly battered, but didn't seem to have any broken bones. 'God bless you, pal,' he said.
Fire engines roared up, sirens screaming. They began playing water on the wreckage. Moss looked for more signs of life under it. As he threw bricks in all directions, he wondered if the people who'd planted this bomb were the same ones who'd written him his notes. If they were, Sam Lopat had been wrong about them-not that he was likely to know that any more.
Down in southern Sonora, winter was the rainy season. Hipolito Rodriguez had planted his fields of corn and beans when the rains started, plowing behind his trusty mule. Now, with 1934 giving way to 1935, he tramped through them hoe in hand, weeding and cultivating. A farmer's work was never done.
These days, he wasn't the only one tramping through the fields. His two older sons, Miguel and Jorge, were big enough to give him real help: one was seventeen, the other sixteen. Before many more years-maybe before many more months-had passed, they would discover women. Once they found wives, they'd go off and farm on their own. Then Rodriguez would have to work his plot by himself again. No-by then Pedro would be old enough to pitch in. Now he enjoyed the extra help.
When the day's work was done-earlier than it would have been without his sons' help-he stood at the sink working the pump handle to get water to wash the sweat from his round brown face. That done, he dried himself on a towel prickly with embroidery from his wife and his mother-in-law.
'Magdalena, you know I am going into Baroyeca tonight,' he said.
His wife sighed but nodded. 'Sн,' she said. The two of them, Magdalena especially, spoke more Spanish than English. Most Sonorans, especially of their generation, did, even though Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the Confederate States ten years longer than either one of them had been alive. Their children, educated in the school in town, used the two languages interchangeably. Schools taught exclusively in English. What the Rodriguezes' children's children would speak was something Hipolito wondered from time to time, but not something he could do anything about.
He said, 'There's nothing to worry about now. We have had no trouble holding Freedom Party meetings since Seсor Featherston won the election.'
Magdalena crossed herself. 'I pray to God you are right. And I still say you have not told me all you could about these times you were shooting at people.'
Since she was right, Rodriguez didn't answer. He ate his supper-beans and cheese wrapped in tortillas-then walked to Baroyeca, about three miles away. He got to town just as the sun was setting.
Baroyeca had never been a big place. A lot of the shops on the main street were shuttered these days, and had been ever since the silver mines in the mountains to the north closed down a few years earlier. If Jaime Diaz's general store ever shut down, Rodriguez didn't know how the town would survive.
Except for the general store and the Culebra Verde, the local cantina, Freedom Party headquarters was the only business in Baroyeca that bothered lighting itself up after sundown. The lamps burned kerosene. Electricity had never appeared here. FREEDOM! the sign on the front window said, and below it, in slightly smaller letters, Ўlibertad!
No matter what Rodriguez had told his wife, an armed guard with bandoleers crisscrossing his chest stood in front of the door. He nodded and stood aside to let Rodriguez go in. 'Hola, Pablo,' Rodriguez said. 'їTodo estб bien?'
'Yes, everything's fine,' Pablo Sandoval answered in English. 'Nobody gonna do nothin' to us now.' Peeking
