Gringos #8, page 3
He swung his head back in, remaining in the doorway. ‘Clear.’
Onslow went forward, holstering the Colt automatic as he did so. He pulled the man’s arms from around his face and underneath, the face was chalk white. The man was shivering and it wasn’t with the cold.
‘Someone chasin’ you?’
The head shook from side to side quickly, eyes finding Onslow’s then sliding away.
‘You been beaten up?’
Another hasty shake of the head.
‘Drunk?’
The head shook once more.
‘What the Hell’s wrong then?’
‘No ... nothin’.’
‘You mean that’s the way you always come through doors?’
The man shook his head so hard he risked ricking his neck.
‘What then?’ put in McCloud, impatient.
‘I sort of, I guess, tripped over something as I was opening the door and after that I ... Oh, my God! ... after that there were all these guns pointing at me and I thought ... I thought ...’
Onslow signaled to McCloud to put up his gun.
‘You thought you were going to get shot, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come into places that way, you’ll likely be right.’
Onslow bent down and hauled the man to his feet. He could feel through the rough wool of the man’s jacket that he was still shaking.
‘Sit down,’ he said, giving him a light push in the direction of one of the tables. ‘Have some coffee, you’ll get over it.’
Onslow and McCloud went for the door.
‘Wait.’ The voice squeaked a little at the end of the word, but it was urgent enough.
‘What now?’
‘Are you the men who know Pancho Villa?’
Hands returned to gun butts fast.
‘What sort of question is that?’ asked McCloud.
The man blinked, eyes gray and nervous in a round, white face. His Adam’s apple pushed out above his collar at a sharp angle. A small scrap of paper had been stuck to the left side of his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving. The wool coat was made in a pattern of small white and black checks and the shirt underneath it was a pinky-red with a cream-colored neck-tie. His pants were light gray cotton. He wore a gray and cream hat that was more like a cap, round and loose on top with a deep peak at the front.
He looked as inconspicuous as a bottle of French champagne at a Mexican bandit’s wedding breakfast, as a Belgian lace garter round a Dallas whore’s leg.
‘I was told ...’ His tongue flickered out, pinky-white and lizard-like, and licked his thin, pale lips. ‘... there were three men in here who knew Villa. Were close to him. Real ...’ The voice drained away to a gurgle of nothing.
Onslow said to Strong over his shoulder. ‘Shut the door.’
He went back close to where the man was standing, his hands gripping the back of a chair for support but the legs of the chair were rattling against the floor boards.
‘What in Hell’s name d’you want with Villa?’
The man gulped a mouthful of air as though it might be his last. ‘I want you to take me to him.’
Harry Johnson had seen his first moving picture in 1897 at Thomas Tally’s Phonograph Parlor in South Spring Street, Los Angeles. He was seventeen years old and it cost him five cents to watch a Vitascope film of the fight between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Harry Johnson was the one who was knocked out.
He got himself a job as relief projectionist in Los Angeles and later in Chicago, where he showed short travel films and advertising films on beer and the Central Pacific Railroad.
It wasn’t enough.
Johnson rode a boxcar to the outskirts of New York and walked until he found the offices of the Edison Studios. For three weeks he badgered at men walking in and out until he was given a job humping scenery around the rooftop studio sets. He hauled painted backdrops up innumerable flights of stairs and then dragged them down again and back to the local vaudeville house from which they had been borrowed. He stood around during filming with a carpet-beater tied to the top of a pole and waved it into the path of any stray pigeon that threatened to fly into any scene in which the presence of a pigeon would have been inappropriate.
He climbed scaffolding and shifted heavy lights.
He begged and borrowed and sometimes stole clothing for costumes from the sweatshops of the East Side.
He backed into D. W. Griffith during a tea break and knocked the director’s cup over in his saucer, the tea splashing down Griffith’s tailored pants and across his patent shoes.
He hand-tinted copies of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.
In the barn dance scene where one woman wears a yellow dress, bouncing and jigging around the frame, that yellow was painted in by Harry Johnson.
When a group of riders gallop between lines of trees, riding at the camera, firing pistols, those puffs and spurts of orange-red flame—they were hand-painted by Harry Johnson, frame after loving, laborious frame.
When the Patents Trust tried to drive the independents from New York and Philadelphia, tried to drive them out of the industry altogether—using law suits and sheriffs, high-court injunctions and eventually men with guns in their side pockets who weren’t frightened to use them—Edison sent Harry Johnson back to Los Angeles to spy out the opposition. Stopping only at a few dozen nickelodeons on the way, Johnson found the opposition and joined it.
He told a few lies about what exactly he’d done in New York and they made him assistant cameraman.
He showed an aptitude for working twenty-seven hours a day and eight days a week and they made him a cameraman.
He went to bed with the wrong producer’s girl and they made him a tea boy, a messenger boy; they said to him, get the Hell down to the Mexican border and set up a meeting with this bandit, Villa. The border was the last place Harry Johnson wanted to go. For one thing he didn’t like tequila, for another tortillas made him retch and for a third it was a good hundred miles away from anything that resembled a movie studio. But he did want to squirm his way back into the company’s good books—anything to get his hands on a camera again. He finally got a deal: if he paved the way for a couple of the company high-ups to talk with Villa, and if that talk came out successfully, then he got to go back as assistant cameraman.
Harry Johnson knew there was no way he could refuse—how else could he make it to the top in his chosen profession? How else was he to become a director?
It took him three weeks, two days to get a lead on the gringos. He paid through the nose for information and much of it was useless. He expected that. Bargained on it. He drank tequila and was sick; ate tortillas and was worse. He met a woman called DeWinter who had once acted on Broadway and got the kind of notices that only came once in a lifetime. She played tragedy and melodrama as if they’d only been invented the play before yesterday. Then when Edison was trying to tempt her into the movies in a two-reel version of The Lady of the Camelias, she married a banker and stockbroker who was related to the English royal family or the German royal family or was it all the same one? When she’d been a child herself and living in London, their nannies had met and swapped stories while doing their knitting in Kensington Park. In a sense they were made for each other.
A scandal that held the front pages for at least a week wrecked the marriage and Marianne DeWinter’s solicitors got her a good settlement on the condition she was never seen in New York or Washington or anywhere civilized people might meet.
She went to Presidio.
She met Harry Johnson late one night or early one morning when she’d been losing too much money at blackjack and drinking too much white wine and felt maudlin enough to reminisce about the days she’d been the most promising dramatic actress in the American theatre.
Harry could recite her reviews word by word.
She loved him: that night she bathed in the afterglow of her fame and she loved him.
She wanted to show her love for him so much that she considered sweeping him off to her white satin sheets, but in a moment of unsteady sobriety she knew that would be a failure.
She could have given him money.
She could have given him sweet cocaine.
She was a sensible, if drunken lady: she asked Harry Johnson what he wanted most in the world.
He told her.
Which was how he found out that there were four Americans who were in town doing some kind of shady business—she didn’t know what and she certainly had no intention of asking—and she was pretty sure she knew where three of them would be around breakfast time.
Harry Johnson, who had been afraid she was going to take him to bed and dreaded it—not because she wasn’t beautiful, but because of what had happened after he’d taken the producer’s girlfriend for a little nocturnal meandering—was so relieved when she gave him the information, he could have broken down and wept.
‘Villa ain’t goin’ to thank us for this, you know.’
Yates McCloud stood alongside his horse, waiting for the ferry to arrive back at the northern bank of the river.
‘He may,’ answered Onslow, scraping a layer of mud from between the sole and heel of his scuffed leather boot. ‘It depends how much money it means to him.’
McCloud snorted. ‘A feller like that, who can’t even walk through a door without falling over, who’s afraid of his own shadow—what sort of money is he going to have?’
Onslow shook his head, threw away a stickful of mud, readjusted his position and began to clean the underside of the other boot. ‘He’s just the messenger. He’s not the one with the power to offer money. He’s just going to sound Villa out. The ones with the money will come later.’
McCloud didn’t look convinced. ‘And what are they going to pay him for? Acting in one of these nickelodeon dramas?’
‘I don’t know. They must want him for something.’
‘Huh!’ McCloud turned away and cursed the ferry for being so damned slow.
‘You seen one of them nickelodeons, major?’ asked Strong.
‘Yeah. A few times. Some of it was pretty amazing. Soldiers fighting somewhere in Europe. The Balkans, I think it was.’
Strong shook his head: ‘I never saw one.’
‘Had one close to where we was stationed once,’ Onslow said.
Jonas Strong grinned. ‘Sure thing, major, but they didn’t allow no blacks inside. Not even if they was in uniform.’
Jamie Durham looked up and laughed, a strange laugh, almost a giggle.
Strong shot him a glance that shut him up.
The ferry was less than fifteen feet away from the shore.
A group of riders, four or five of them, came cantering in from the direction of the town, looking to travel south across the water and the border.
Onslow and the others turned their heads, but gave the men no special attention.
The ferryman’s shrill, off-key whistle was loud enough now to jar on every nerve. The water splashed up onto the river bank as the rope was hauled through the final feet. Harry Johnson, not as used to watching men on horseback as the gringos, was still watching the approaching riders, their canter continuing—only now their leader was beginning to turn his mount broadside on.
‘Hey!’ Harry yelled, stumbling backwards as he tried to attract Onslow’s attention. ‘Hey, look there!’
He banged into McCloud instead and McCloud pushed him off angrily and Johnson cannoned from one horse’s rump into another.
‘Hey!’ He shouted as he went down on one knee. ‘Hey, they’ve got guns!’
Onslow heard him all right, heard and swung his head, body already ducking, hand diving inside his vest for the Mauser automatic in its wooden holster.
Jonas Strong was the next to react, seconds later, throwing himself well to the right, clawing the Colt .45 from his side as he split the air.
A volley of shots came from the mounted men; a man screamed with sudden pain; one of the horses bucked and reared as blood plashed down its pinto flank.
Cade Onslow had cocked the hammer for the first shot and sent it a foot in front of the leading rider. The spent shell ejected into the air before him and the remainder of the magazine splayed the attackers. Strong rested his left elbow on the ground, gripped his right wrist with his fingers, aimed at the last man and dropped him from the saddle.
A horse behind Jamie Durham shied and sent him sprawling, the Colt Thunderer jarring from his hand, unused.
McCloud dodged backwards, slowest to react. His first instinct was one of self-preservation, wheeling behind his mount and then reaching for the pistol in the shoulder rig, ducking low as bullets sought him out. He flattened himself in the mud and dirt and angled up the Colt Lightning towards the group of riders.
He was too late: superfluous.
Onslow and Strong had accounted for them already. Three to the major, the other to Jonas. Only one of them was still alive and that soon to be a matter for conjecture. One man lay on his back, eyes staring sightlessly up into the clearest of skies, his face was stubbled yet untouched and showed no pain. Not even distress. One of the 7.63mm slugs had driven across his ribs, causing no more than a deep graze which tore his plaid shirt and lanced a red groove through his tanned skin.
The force of it had twisted him in the saddle so that the second bullet had taken him low in the back, several inches left of the spinal column. It had deflected upwards and burst out through the center of his chest, flowering through the space left by the rib cage, a neat symmetrical burst of tissue and blood.
His face still didn’t look dead.
That of the rider who’d been struck by the major’s automatic fire next looked very dead indeed. Three shots had spun him from the back of his mount, stitching him from upper thigh to side to neck, strands of blood linking one to the other in a seamless chain.
Jonas Strong had taken his time: he had only fired a single shot.
Enough.
He had shot the man immediately below the line of his hat brim, an inch in front of the ear.
The rider still alive had his left boot trapped inside his stirrup and was lying on his back and shoulders, writhing this way and that where the chestnut mare stood, some fifty yards away up the sloping ground that led down to the river.
Jamie Durham mounted up and trotted out towards him.
He had one bullet still in his right arm, trapped in the fat above the bone; another had smashed through him, crumbling his left side in a bloody welter that seemed to have sucked his shirt and vest into it. He was half-yelling, half-crying, tears splashed across his jowled face.
Jamie freed his foot from the stirrup and the chestnut immediately shied round and cantered away.
The man blinked at Jamie and saw the mask covering half his face and for an instant he wondered if he were, in fact, already dead.
Jamie convinced him that he wasn’t with a well-placed kick into his left hip.
There was something he wanted to know and only this man now could tell him; it was perfectly reasonable—he wanted to know who had paid four men to ride in and try to shoot down himself and his friends.
A perfectly reasonable request.
The wounded man didn’t seem to agree—not at first.
Jamie knelt alongside him and did his best to convince him otherwise.
The man was frightened to say too much: if he told Jamie what he wanted to know then he’d get killed for it.
Jamie explained to him that he wasn’t thinking logically. After all, he was going to die anyway and soon. All he had to do was say a name.
The man seemed to agree, his eyes seemed to agree, though his mouth still didn’t open. Jamie hurried him along a little. There was a shrill scream, and for a few moments Jamie feared he might have overdone things, but then the mouth opened and apart from a sliver of surprisingly bright blood, the name slid out.
Satisfied, Jamie stood up and went over to his horse. Not quite there, he turned around and walked back, drew his pistol and put a bullet through the wounded man’s brain. There were days when Jamie Durham was a very considerate person indeed.
‘Kennedy?’ asked Onslow as the Kid rode back.
Jamie nodded: ‘Kennedy.’
Onslow’s face was grim. ‘Before very long we’re going to have to make another ride into Presidio.’
‘And finish Mister Kennedy?’
Onslow nodded. ‘No doubt about it.’
One of the other people waiting for the ferry had been injured in the attack, a flesh wound in the arm which caused him a great deal of shock, not a little pain, but little more. One of the horses had been badly shot up and had had to be killed.
Otherwise there were no casualties except to the attackers.
And to Harry Johnson’s blood pressure.
It had taken McCloud several minutes to prise Johnson’s arms from around his head and to get him up to his feet. His face was still flushed and his pulse was racing.
When he tried to speak all that happened was that his teeth chattered together in an irregular tattoo.
‘You okay?’ asked Strong, when they were at the midpoint in the river crossing.
Harry Johnson leaned back from the side of the ferry and he was still swaying. ‘Does this sort of thing happen often?’
A broad smile lit up Strong’s face. ‘From time to time.’
Johnson nodded and his eyelids flickered, vomit rose to the back of his throat. His mind ran back to those hand-tinted scenes from The Great Train Robbery. They hadn’t simply been exciting, they had been beautiful, too. Beautiful hand-painted flowers of pinky-orange flame. He had not been called upon to color in the blood: nor yet the pain.
Chapter Four
THE SKY WAS gun-metal gray. The sun had never been any more than a few purple streaks on the dawn horizon. The wind, which had been blowing from the north-west, had dropped. Everything was still, heavy. The guerrilleros who waited disconsolately around Villa’s camp were solemn faced, bored. The women camp followers sat in small groups, mending clothing, preparing food, not daring to get in the men’s way for fear of being struck from sheer frustration.
