sliver of gold visible from between the leather flaps, he spread the wallet open to be contemptibly sure it was what he thought it was. What lay on the cracked and dry leather surface-an insignificant trinket of a crucifix with one broken cross beam.
How long had it been since anything had savaged his being or left him bare? But there it was.
Was it possible—
He slipped the cross back and closed the leather flaps and put the wallet back in the pant pockets. He stood in the midst of upheaval knowing ... he had been undone by his own hand.
IN THE ROOM, alone, John Lourdes dressed in clean clothes. He took his wallet from the other trousers. He made sure his mother's cross was there before tucking it into his back pocket. He slipped on his shoulder holster. He sat at a desk and prepared a wire to justice Knox, then a letter to Wadsworth Burr.
Night had come and he motorcycled back out to the Agua Negra field offices to find out what had happened to Rawbone, but no one knew. While he was there John Lourdes did learn the women had been taken to a cafeteria for the guards down the road. That was to be their station. There he was told that Teresa and Sister Alicia had been brought to the mayor's house to work as part of the kitchen crew. He motorcycled to that address, which was by the Laguna del Carpintero.
The turreted house stood three stories in the moonlight. It was an ill-conceived spectacle of iron grillwork and marquees and Moorish porticos. In the huge lot behind it were two oil derricks, and where the ground declined toward the laguna was a foul black soup. There were piles of rotted lumber and a wrecked barge at the edge of the shore and supply shacks and chalans and a rusting truck with a fence around it for horses and mules and a battery of goats.
The house burned with light when John Lourdes rode past. In the great room with sconces and braided scrollwork were a dozen men. They were deep in conversation while drinking. One of the men was Doctor Stallings, another Anthony Hecht. John Lourdes parked the motorcycle against a tree and shadowed the darkness to get a better view.
The mayor, who was of Mexican descent, seemed to have much of the conversation directed at him, though there was one other man who appeared to be of central importance. He wore a near-white suit and favored a mustache much like John Lourdes. He was older and had a cultured face and often he would clip his thumbs inside his suspenders when he spoke.
Where the kitchen light cast itself upon the darkness John Lourdes saw a crew of women at their work stations. Teresa was in a corner scrubbing pots; Alicia was at the stove. He called to the old woman through the screen door. She put out her arms in a gesture of surprise at seeing him, then looked back at the closed door to the hall. They talked for a few minutes before she went and tugged at Teresa's hair.
Teresa came forward in a leather apron tied around her neck that hung almost to the ground; her arms were dripping wet. She was embarrassed yet elated at seeing John Lourdes. He held out a piece of paper torn from his notebook.
He had written: / wan4eJ 4o make sure you were a/r~~4. /'m s4ay'/ji a4 4e 5ov4ern /-/o4e/, iS you Sind yourse/S wi4 4rouble.
He wanted her to have it, but she made a gesture with her hand for the pencil. She slipped open the screen door. She wrote on the same page: /4's jood 4o see you. This she underlined.
From back in the house a man was calling out and the door to the hall swung open. John Lourdes forced the page they had written on into her hands before retreating to the darkness. In those few moments with Teresa he had picked up some of the conversation coming from that other room. Most of it seemed to deal with the mayor and where he stood politically now that the insurrection had been authorized.
Along the side of the house John Lourdes spotted a root cellar. It was practically beneath the rooms where the men were. He went and knelt by the canted entranceway. He looked about. There were but two men down by the derricks. He could see the faint glow of their cigarettes. He worked the latch and lifted the weathered door. He bent and felt his way down a set of wobbly steps. He closed the night off and hunched there in the dark. The cellar was foul with decay and fungaled shorings, the floor was flooded with a few inches of tainted water and every cautious step he took slopped behind him.
On the floorboards overhead the men's boots tapped out their pacings or creaked when chairs were moved. But that black and stinking hole was near about as good as a stethoscope for picking up their conversation.
THIRTY-ONE
HEN HE LEFT the hotel room Rawbone walked the streets with his bindle slung over one shoulder like some aimless tramp. He tried to discredit every incident, every day, every hour and minute from El Paso to that very moment as if to deny the undeniable.
