them, they were one. The son whispered, 'Yes ... yes, I forgive you.'
He could feel his father's face against his own and this choking sound through clenched teeth like, 'Yes.' Then the son put his lips to his father's ear, 'Can you still hear me?'
The father squeezed his son's hand, answering that he could and his son told him, 'Father ... save a seat in the truck for me.'
Somewhere in that poisonous fever the father filled with those words and then, through what seemed this twilight tunnel, he could have sworn he heard the truck engine and the gears shifting and the steel musculature picking up speed and he was riding with the son through a land that was neither desolate nor forsaken ... and then he was no more.
THIRTY-SEVEN
HERE WERE JUST unanchored moments after that-being lifted from the sidewalk and the body against that ageless brick, the smell of ether and shadows upon an operating room wall. How long he was unconscious he did not know, but he came to in the dark, feeling as if he were on a train. His eyes followed a trail of light back to a kerosene lamp. A nurse sat nearby in the storage car, reading. She was Mexican and middle-aged and there was a solitary peacefulness about her. As she smiled at him, a figure leaned over the cot. It was Wadsworth Burr.
'Where are we?'
'You're on a train, John. I'm taking you to the military hospital at Brownsville. It was your notebook. The nuns saw my address and notified me.'
'My father-'
'John, just listen, right now. This is imperative. When Justice Knox comes to see you, you're to say nothing unless I'm in the room. Do you understand? Nothing.'
John Lourdes was swimmy and confused.
'A politician in Tampico was allegedly murdered and there is a suggestion you were somehow involved.'
What surprised Wadsworth Burr was that John Lourdes laughed. It was gravelly and ironic and self-possessed, it was a laugh he had heard before.
THE HOSPITAL WAS on the Fort Brown military post. The window in John Lourdes's room looked out toward the Resaca. At night the soldiers would play cards along the shore in the lamplight. John Lourdes spent the weeks there recuperating fundamentally alone. He had a masculine thirst for silence and used it to revisit his life and the fallen adversary that had become again his father.
Justice Knox arrived with a stenographer. Burr was present as John Lourdes accurately detailed the events in Mexico, which were corroborated in his notes, even down to turning the munitions over to a group of campesinos. The only fact overlooked-his being the son of that common assassin.
The front of the hospital had a long covered portico with brick archways where one could avoid the searing Texas sun. Justice Knox excused the stenographer, and he and Wadsworth Burr started down that walkway alone.
'He'll have to resign.'
'Oh,' said Wadsworth Burr, 'at the very least.'
Burr took a cigarette case from his coat pocket. 'The notes my client sent to you. A copy was also sent to me. I immediately hired detectives in Mexico to begin my own investigation. Cigarette?'
Knox shook his head no. This news did not sit well. There was a bench nearby where Burr went.
'A man named Tuerto was hired by Doctor Stallings through Agua Negra to photograph the oil fields, wharfs, river, harbor, rail lines.'
'Which sounds like a useful policy for a security firm.'
Burr crossed his legs and lit the cigarette. 'I have a signed affidavit from this Mr. Tuerto that he delivered copies of the photographs to Mr. Robert Creeley, who as you know from John's notes and briefing, or your own investigation, is adjunct to the U.S. consulate in Mexico. '
'There is nothing extraordinary about that either. The oil companies, as well as others, have been making their case about field security since the first hints of a revolution.'
'Mr. Creeley was staying at the Southern. The same hotel as my client . . . clients. As were two other gentlemen, Olsen and Hayden. Who, as you probably know through your own investigation, as I do through mine, are information gatherers for the Department of State.'
Justice Knox had been standing under an archway, but now he
