make the force even more efficient. The Rurales too, if you can imagine them any better at their work than they already are. It’s a new age for Mexico, John. This country’s always been a jackpot of resources, but these people, God love them, have never had what it takes to make use of their own riches. What this country needs is foreign capital and know-how and a good rail system, and it’s getting them. In the next few years there won’t be a corner of the country the rails haven’t reached. But first you have to have order. That’s what Don Porfirio’s brought to this country, John, order. That’s why outside investment’s starting to pour in. And it’s just the beginning, my friend. With Don Porfirio running things again, it’s just the beginning.”
John Roger grinned. “You speak as though the man can walk on water.”
“You mock, sir, but much of what he’s doing
“Ya lo se,” John Roger said. “Pan o palo.”
“Exactamente, mi amigo. Share my bread or feel my club. A simple offer and a very effective one. And, if you ask me, a damned generous one to make to his enemies. The wise ones always choose the bread.”
“I can understand why. His enemies have a tendency to vanish. Now and then one gets found out in the scrub with a bullet in the head or his throat cut.”
“Oh come now, John,” Amos said. “You can’t be serious in that implication.”
John Roger arched his brow and Amos looked away. Then looked back at him and then they burst out laughing. “Oh hell, let’s eat,” Amos said, and slapped him on the back. They lunched in a restaurant, then returned to the house for a siesta.
Just before he dozed off, John Roger reflected that his friend had found his rightful calling, and like every man’s calling, it had its own credo and rationale.
The party for Diaz that evening was in a mansion on a street adjoining the zocalo. John Roger would have preferred to walk there—the better for a close-up view of the city’s center at night—but a light rain was falling and so they took a hired cab. The streets gleamed. The lamplights were nimbused with mist.
The cavernous ballroom was ablaze with chandeliers. Women sparkled with jewelry. Candles glimmering on the tables, glittering buckets of iced champagne. Ball gowns and tailcoats and military finery. The dance floor a colorful whirl of couples spinning to the orchestral strains of Strauss. John Roger was introduced by Amos to army officers and government officials and hacendados from all over central Mexico, but he would remember the names of none of them. The host had provided a number of unmarried girls as dance partners for men who had come without escort, and Amos took happy turns on the floor with all of them. John Roger claimed a bad knee and kept to the table. The closeness of the crowd oppressed him. The babble and laughter. The over-loud music. Only the expectation of meeting Diaz kept him from making an excuse to Amos and their host and taking his leave.
He had endured for two hours when the host mounted the dais to announce that he had just received a message bearing the president’s sincere regrets that he would not be able to attend the festivities. Don Porfirio and Dona Carmen sent their deepest apologies to everyone present and urged them all to have a good time.
“Hard luck, chum,” Amos said to John Roger, “but there’ll be other chances.”
John Roger said he hoped so. Then said he was tired and thought he might be catching cold and so was going to go back to the house and to bed. Amos said he would leave with him but John Roger knew he was enjoying himself and persuaded him to stay.
He intended to hire a hansom, but when he got outside and saw that the rain had stopped he chose to walk. The night was cold, the air sharp, the streetlights warmly bright. An evening so amenable he decided to alter his route and prolong the walk back, and he turned north at the first street corner he came to.
A few blocks farther on, the surroundings became distinctly less well tended and the people on the street louder. He came to a crowded little plaza of an unkempt, working-class neighborhood whose architecture testified to a more genteel past. The curbs were lined with litter but the square was gaily lit and piquant with spicy aromas, lively with chatter and laughter, with music from a pair of cantinas on opposite sides of the plaza. At a sidewalk cart he bought a pork tamal and ate it as he ambled. He paused at the open doors of one of the cantinas, in which someone was strumming a guitar and singing in tremulous nostalgia about his boyhood in Durango. He listened for a minute, then moved on, ready to head back to Amos’s.
He was almost to the corner when he heard a different tune and from a different sort of instrument. Heard it but barely through the surrounding babble and other music, but heard it well enough to recognize it at once, and he halted in his tracks. He thought he might be having an aberrant mental episode. Maybe he was not really hearing the tune but only remembering it after so many years and for who-knew-what reason. He stood rooted, listening hard as passersby sidestepped around him. Now the tune was lost in the laughter of a group of men on the corner just ahead and then the laughter abated and he heard the tune more clearly now among the plaza’s other sounds. And knew he was hearing it with his ears and not just in his head. The tweedle of a hornpipe. Playing “Good Jolly Roger.”
The tune was coming from his left. From within the chocked-open doors of a small cafe not five yards away. A sign next to the door showed the name La Rosa Mariposa in ornate but faded lettering. He went to the door and kept to the shadow alongside it and peered into a dimly lighted room with a few small tables and only a single diner and no one at the little bar but a barman in a white apron. The barman was playing the pipe. He looked about thirty years old. Thick through the chest and shoulders, black hair combed back and parted in the center, short mustache. But even at this distance and despite the mustache, John Roger saw the likeness and knew who the man must be and how he had learned that tune.
For a moment, everything seemed unreal—the barman, the tune, the plaza, the people passing by, the fact that he was in Mexico City, the memory of a brother he had grown up with in a Portsmouth tavern. . . .
The sensation passed. And he thought, Maybe he taught it to somebody who taught it to this one.
No. Look at him. He could be my own. He learned it from his father and none other. From Sammy. Whom you have believed dead these many years but is not.
He is not dead.
But why has he never. . .?
Who knows? But if that’s not his son I never drew breath.
Well then?
He inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly. Went inside.
The barman saw him approaching and set the hornpipe under the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. Good evening, sir. What is your pleasure?
Tell me, John Roger began, but heard the tight note in his voice and paused to clear his throat. Tell me, that tune you were playing just now. Where did you learn it?
The barman smiled. The little jig? You liked it, huh?
Did your father teach it to you?
The barman’s smile went smaller. Yes, he said. How did you know?
I would like to speak with him.
With my
Yes, please. I’m . . . I know him. Listen, is he here? It’s very important I see him.
But sir, my father . . . well, my father’s dead. He’s been dead for, ah, about ten years, I guess.
Dead? John Roger repeated the word as if he had never before heard it. In the midst of his stunning understanding that his brother had not died all those years ago, it had not crossed his mind that he might have died since.
You say you knew my father?
Yes. Yes, I . . . ten years?
Yeah, just about.
What did . . . how did he die?
Oh God, don’t ask. It wasn’t good. Listen, how do—?
How did he die? Tell me.
Jesus, man, if you
John Roger stared at him. Then down at his hands on the bar top.
Yeah, see? Like I said, it wasn’t good.
How did it happen?
