Larry Ashton

Not one man had dark skin. Half of them were blond.

Long ago, while my friend Steve, a cartoonist, and I sat lamenting our poverty, he suggested I write a short story for the swinging singles’ magazine to which he'd agreed to contribute a weekly strip. I phoned the publisher, who outlined the type of ‘‘story" he desired. “A hundred bucks if I get it by Friday." he boasted.

We walked toward the nearby Zona Rosa, a few square blocks we called Hell.

Larry Ashton

Already tasting the feast we could buy Friday night, chile rellenos and Tres Equis cerveza, I placed my fingers on the typewriter keys and remembered Wendy. I don’t recall her real name. She was only a vision from my last year in high school, my first season playing semi-pro baseball in Tijuana — first base, scratch hitter, medium power, no speed. We played double headers on Sundays, single games on Friday nights, at Campo Benito Juarez, a ramshackle stadium in a part of town where dogs and drunks slept on the sidewalks and I saw the first dead person I’d ever viewed outside a funeral home.

With his second gasp, a word came out. “Wendy?"

Larry Ashton

My friend Terry tripped over him, as we walked toward the nearby Zona Rosa, a few square blocks we called Hell. There was a nightclub, the Blue Fox, which might’ve been the nastiest establishment on earth. On each of three levels, a young woman pranced or writhed on a stage around which drunken fellows crowded, leering as if they were lepers and the “dancer” had the cure.

“Okay, troops, now we going to see the beautiful virgin..."

Larry Ashton

Terry, a red-haired shortstop, and I ventured in there one night, at least. A few tequilas, and we climbed to the third, nastiest level, where the clientele looked like escapees from death row who d fought their way across the border then binged for a week or so. We sat on a stage-side bench.

A naked man lay on his back on a long wooden table. A red mask covered his face.

Larry Ashton

When Terry gasped. I squeezed my beer so hard the cheap glass cracked. Maybe one of those desperados hated ballplayers — we still wore our jerseys — and had murdered him. With his second gasp, a word came out. “Wendy?"

She was a cheerleader at his high school. A sweetheart, homecoming princess, B student and reputed virgin. Only a few weeks before, Terry had asked her out. She'd turned him down graciously, claiming that every weekend she visited a boyfriend who attended college up the coast.

The way she looked when she recognized him, as though he'd lassoed her heart in barbed wire and yanked it tight, made Terry drag me out of there and later promise not to whisper to anyone our story of Wendy’s secret life.

About ten years later I wrote a story about her, called it ‘The Blue Fox.” and decided not to give it to the singles’ magazine. The publisher probably would’ve turned it down. It wasn’t dirty enough — as I wrote it. I’d gotten too damned fond of the girl to make her perform for a gang of swinging singles. No Tres Equis that Friday. But a year or two later, after ‘The Blue Fox” appeared in Colorado Review, I sent it to the National Endowment for the Arts as part of a fellowship application. By God, they gave me a pile of money, hundred times as much as the singles' rag offered.

While writing about Wendy. I got intrigued by the idea of searching for someone lost in Tijuana, which was and is a marvelously and sometimes comically sinister place. I’m fascinated by the kinds of people drawn to the frontiers, and by the city itself, and its history — observing Tijuana is like watching Mexico and the U.S through a magnifying glass.

I was bom near Tijuana soon after World War II. Older friends and relatives have told me dozens of stories about that era, when San Diego, only 20 miles north, was possibly the largest military installation in the world. I’d often wished to have known the place back then, roamed the streets alongside displaced European Jews and German conspirators as well as the beggars, homeless Indians, and multitude of hustlers you’ll find there even now if you look in the right neighborhoods. And I still wondered what had become of Wendy.

A few years ago, I decided to visit that place and time, searching for her. To help find my way. and for backup in case of trouble. I needed to follow a good detective. I chose Tom Hickey because he resembles my father, who didn't last long enough for me to know him very well, at least until Hickey and I went searching.

As Clifford Rose came to, the first thing he recognized was the stink, like a drainpipe running out of hell. Then he remembered.

“Wendy,” he screamed. This time no one answered.

The big mestizo thugs dragged him through the doorway of the Club de Paris into the fog, across the dirt sidewalk and down three high steps to the muddy street. They flipped him over, threw him face down into the mud. The biggest one kicked him with a pointed boot in the neck. The chest. The forehead. Finally the one they called Mofeto, who had sliced the gash in Clifford’s cheek, sauntered out of the club. The runt of the litter, with a sharp face, pinched mouth, starved eyes, he wore a felt hat and a baggy dark suit His hand with the switchblade swung beside him.

As the runt stepped closer. Clifford heaved himself up on one arm. Slobbering blood, he croaked. “You give her up now, hear. I got friends. You’ll see ”

The runt straightened his coat and gazed both ways again. From the side of his mouth, like a parrot, he squawked. “Oh, you got friends. Sure. We don’t want trouble.” Lazily, he folded and pocketed his switchblade, reached beneath his baggy coat, then his hand shot out, gripping a long-barreled .45 revolver. “I better kill you now.”

Clifford dropped and covered his head with his arms. He tried to push off with his legs, but they slipped in the mud and the biggest mestizo stomped and held his ankle down, while the runt bent closer until the gun barrel touched the base of Clifford’s skull.

A deep voice shouted from the door of the Club de Paris. The patron, a Latino, in his cream-colored pin-striped suit, stepped across the sidewalk and aimed a finger at the runt. “Basta. Mofeto," he commanded, and whipped his arm toward the door.

Over both cities lay thick, drizzling clouds. No moon or stars shined through. Streetlamps stood dark. Old neon signs hung in disrepair. North of the line, even the headlamps of cars stayed unlit or dimmed by thin coats of paint on their lenses. The only lights flickered behind window shades.

From the border you couldn't see either city. But you could smell Tijuana. As the wind shifted, smells would change from burning rubber to gasses, to nose-biting whiffs of chile fields, to sewage in the river, to whores’ perfumes. And though San Diego lay ten miles north, if you listened closely you could hear a steady noise, the low howl of wheels cutting over wet asphalt as trucks carried supplies to another day of war. It was April 1943.

Tom Hickey stood on the border under the shelter between a lane for cars and a turnstile and passway for walkers. A sentry. His mouth was set in a scornful way. The blue of his eyes held no gleam. His blond, gray-flecked, scraggly hair inched over his ears and his uniform was a mess. No top button on the shin. The white helmet lying on the ground beside him. The gun and holster he wore shifted around behind so it wouldn’t get in the way. His sleeves were rolled up almost to the white MP band.

A carload of officers who pulled to the line reeked of French perfume and whiskey. Officers didn’t come back smelling like Tijuana. They earned the scents of classy whores and gambling spots down the coast at Playa Rosarito.

Hickey said. "Sirs, if you were approached by anyone who may have ties to a foreign government. I’ll take your report. If you copulated with a Mexican, stop at the clinic over there."

A Marine lieutenant leaned out the window, squinting to look Hickey up and down. Then the car jumped forward into the darkness.

Hickey threw them a mock salute. He checked the time. 11:45. In a few minutes the next watch would show. So he could cross the border, tramp through the mud down by the river to Coco’s Licores where he’d grab a short bottle of mescal, and head back to meet Lefty for the ride — 15 miles in the open Jeep with dimmed lights to the MP barracks near the harbor downtown. He'd drink on the ride. then lie in his bunk and hallucinate. Maybe he’d sleep and dream of Elizabeth.

He didn't see Clifford Rose step up behind him. The kid slumped like any second he’d lose to gravity. When Hickey finally turned, Gifford stood gawking at him. A golden-haired, handsome kid, breathing raspily, his eyes full of the glazed, pained look Hickey knew well, since not so long ago it appeared every time he sported a mirror. Before he squared off against his demons and drowned them in booze.

A week before, the kid had showed up mutilated, dragged by a gang of Marines. He looked like somebody had rolled him down the muddy street, then dipped him in a vat of blood. He was so bad Hickey had walked them clear across the compound to the clinic shack before he recognized the kid as a fellow from boot camp, somebody he’d liked and shot a couple games of pool with. For three days, until he heard different, he figured the kid might die.

But now he stood there in a sport coat, slacks, and a hat, rentals from a downtow n locker room, his face only marred by a few small scabs and a Band-Aid on his cheek, an inch below the right eye. Hickey asked what he was doing out of uniform.

There’s some guys in TJ might not recognize me in this stuff," Clifford muttered. "Pop, reckon we could talk a little?"

Hickey studied the kid. who looked so w retchedly sweet and innocent only a creep could’ve sent him on his way. He called over to the next gate, reminded Lefty he was going south for a bottle. Five minutes later, when the next watch arrived, Hickey and the kid stepped across the border and walked through the drizzle toward Coco’s Licores.

Hickey bought two short bottles of mescal, gave the change to a beggar woman, and they started back. Their feet plopped and sucked in and out of the red clay mud as they crossed the knoll along the river. The riverbed was 100 yards across, a sandy plain cut by a stream full of algae, mosses, the froth of sewage. The water poured like syrup through the narrow arroyo.

Along the riverbed, beyond the stream about 500 Indians camped. Their tires smouldered in the drizzle. Many of them slept uncovered in the sand. Some lay beneath cardboard and scrap-wood shelters. Haunted people walked like shadows near the riverbank. or squatted alone, staring at the rain.

Most of these Indians lived off handouts and garbage. Among them were the sick, the freaks, the deformed and unciever. Their children prowled the streets and bars begging from drunken troopers, training to be w bores and thieves.

Hickey motioned toward the settlement, hoping Rose might notice the misery and think less of his own. whatever it was. As they turned and started walking again. Hickey passed the bottle. The kid took it. gulped, coughed again. Finally he said, "Thanks. Pop. Sure I’m scared. But not so bad." He glanced toward the river, then turned back. “It’s okay I call you Pop?"

“I don't give a damn." Hickey muttered. They’d been calling him Pop the last three months, since he was the oldest guy in boot camp and looked at least his age. 37, especially when he frowned and the lines cut deep across his high forehead.

While they turned and walked the last 50 yards to the border, Hickey realized that nobody else had asked if he minded being Pop. He decided he liked this kid. No swagger or bluff about him. A rare find. An honest man.

Hickey climbed one step into the Jeep and got jerked back out. His arm cinched in the fierce grip of Clifford Rose, like the kid was some brute who didn't know his strength, Hickey wheeled around and said, “Let go —" before he noticed Clifford's eyes.

They had swelled and whitened. “I wanta show you something. Okay. Pop?" His voice had cracked, and he dropped Hickey’s arm. “Reckon you’ll go back to TJ with me?”

“No," Hickey said. “I’m tired, going to be drunk soon as I can get there.” He took a swallow of mescal. “Only a stooge shows up in Tijuana that way."

Clifford’s eyes closed, and the skin of his face drew up tighter. “There's something I gotta do,” he said, “and it ain’t liable to be easy. But you and me could do it. I mean to pay." He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a brand new 50. and held it between them. “See. I heard you was a detective. It can't hurt to look, ain’t that right?"

“Hell it can’t,” Hickey muttered. But futilely. He wasn’t going to leave the kid to get massacred again, at least not without knowing why. He cussed under his breath. His night was sure wrecked. No quiet. No sleep or good dreams. He grabbed the 50 and said harshly. “Aw. Christ, c'mon.” He turned and waved Lefty away.

They plodded back across the line and down the road to a coffee and taco stand where the cabs always waited. There was only one taxi at this hour, a ten-year-old, battered Chrysler limousine painted shiny red and pink. The driver sat in the rain on the hood, munching from a sack of salted peanuts.

A deep knife scar, diamond-shaped, ran from his right cheek down to the lip, which he tried to cover with a mustache, but hair didn't flourish on the scar. So his mustache was mostly on the left side, below the patch on his eye. He wore a black Texan hat. old and crumpled as if he’d found it smashed on the road, and a long black zoot coat.

Clifford said. “Please bring us to the Paris Club."

With a gnn. the cabbie leaped to the ground. "You going to see La Rosa.” They climbed into the limo and he kept talking. 'That one’s an angel, man. I swear to you. I see her lots of times. Hey, you guys want some reefer, I know where it is. Man. I know where everything is in TJ.”

While Clifford sat rigidly glaring at the cabbie. Hickey sipped mescal as they bumped and lurched over the ruts and potholes across the bridge and into central Tijuana on its one paved road, Avenida Revolucion.

Parts of the sidewalk looked like a dark midway, where the men wandered and yelled — soldiers, sailors, dockhands, displaced Jews, Japanese merchants. Some walked holding hands with the flashiest Indian whores, argued with the big mestizo pimps. Just enough light spilled out of the doorways so you could see drunks lying on the sidewalk and dark women who squatted, begging, with babies cradled in their arms. Children in rags hawked gum and benzedrine.

Hickey screwed open the second bottle of mescal, took a snort, and ( passed it to Clifford, wondering what could be so important at the Club de Paris. Maybe the kid just wanted another poke at the guys who'd thrashed him. but he guessed there was more. You could tell by the stiff slowness of his every move that Clifford was deep in pain, all the way to his heart. Probably he wouldn't talk because words can cheapen the pain — Hickey knew the feeling.

“You looking for pills, opium, I know where that is.” The cabbie wheeled left off the paved road and crashed down a hill on washboard. The limo clattered like a jackhammer, but he drove relaxed with one hand and at the same time turned back and grinned. "After you see La Rosa Blanca, mar., you wanna chica for your own. I know where she is. You got all the shit in the world right here. man. there’s even spies and you don’t know what else right here in TJ.”

As they pulled to a stop in front of the Club de Paris. Clifford fitted on a pair of rimless specs and tugged his hat low.

The club was bordered on the east by warehouses running a few blocks to the river, on the west by a lot full of high weeds and rubble. The stucco was soot-dulled adorned with sketched silhouettes of dancing girls. Two thugs stood at the door. The big one welcomed them heartily, while the scrawny one they called Mofeto stayed quiet with his arms folded. Until suddenly his hand shot out and grabbed the pistol from the holster at Hickey’s side.

Hickey reached into his pocket and handed the runt a quarter. “Keep an eye on the gun. amigo."

He walked behind Clifford, who paid the one-dollar cover charge. As they stepped inside, the stench hit. Like dead things boiled in formaldehyde, it blended from the smoke and vomit and spills that caked the floor and spotted the walls. The place was lit only by a blue neon light above the stage. There a skinny Indian dancer gyrated. She wore high heels, dark stockings, black panties, and a top hat and balanced herself with a cane.

The club was one large room, all wooden, high-ceilinged. Every footstep, voice, and scrape of a chair leg echoed and mixed with the music, a droning alto sax, somber and lowly, and the conga drum like a dying pulse. There were about 20 small, round wooden tables, half of them vacant, with many of the chairs overturned, kicked around, broken. But along the three sides of the stage, tables were filled by gringo troops.

The Mexican Army must’ve been on alert tonight, Hickey thought. Cardenas — the ex-President who’d returned as a general to tighten the border and shoreline defenses — kept his troops on a tight rein. Not one of them was here.

Gringos whistled and hooted. A few of them hung over the low rail of the stage and tried to goose the dancer. She teased, wiggling close in, sprang hack, and smacked at them with her cane. Then she ran the cane back and forth, in and out. between her legs.

Hickey followed the kid and sat at a table away from the stage, on the dim side of the blue light. He ga/ed around the room, stealthily took out his bottle, and swallowed a long pull, lie reached the bottle toward Clifford. But the kid sat in a trance, his face more pallid than ever, under the blue light.

Hickey flagged a waiter, signaled for two beers, and watched the skinny dancer as she peeled down her panties, took them off and used them to wipe the sweat from her face, then pushed out her behind and shook it around just beyond the reach of the grabbing, whooping Marines. She turned and stuck out her tongue, shimmied her pointed breasts, strolled off through the silver-blue curtain beside the two musicians at the rear of the stage. Hickey turned to the kid. “Where is it?”

Looking up vaguely, Clifford muttered. “She’ll be out next."

“She?" Hickey bolted up straight — this punk had lured him down here on account of a whore. “She?"

The beers came. The kid paid. Hickey decided to leave about one minute after he got an eyeful of this Rosa broad, who must be the piece that Clifford was swooning over. The one the cabbie had got poetic about.

Soon the old humpbacked conga drummer appeared on the stage and rasped, “Okay, troops, now we going to see the beautiful virgin, la chica mas hermosa in all TJ. We going to bring her out now. La Rosa Blanca." The customers stomped and whistled. The announcer sat down and beat a lazy roll on his drum. As the curtain parted, a hush fell over the room. Out stepped the girl.

She was purely naked. No shoes, no beads or ribbons, and her skin shined the color of ivory, only brighter, moonlike. All the men gaped, including Hickey. He got up, stepped closer, put on his glasses, while the kid stayed back in the dark.

She was small, with most of her height in the legs. Long, rounded calves and thighs. The hips were smooth but muscled, slender, tapering gradually up to her waist. Her long, sleek arms made circular patterns in the air. and even her long, floating hands wore no rings or polish. The breasts were round and small in profile, the nipples tiny as flower buds. Her shoulders sloped gently, her neck was long. And the face, haloed in shaggy golden hair, soft and glowing, stunned you most of all. Her face made Hickey’s breath go shallow.

The skin was pure, and the eyes glistened blue then emerald and darted shyly from the men to the floor. Sometimes they closed. She had round cheeks and pink lips, the bottom one fuller, and it curled up just slightly on the right side, caught between a pout and a little smile. There was no trace of anger, guile, smugness. You might not find a face more innocent in all the world. She looked about 15.

And she danced with grace, flowing across the stage, until she caught sight of something in the dark behind Hickey. Then she began to move stiffly with arms at her sides, bouncing woodenly from the knees. Finally she stepped to the rail and looked down at the men who crowded there. She stood still until the first man touched her. And. letting each man touch her in turn, she moved along the rail.

A giant Marine ran his fingers down the curve of her thigh. A sailor cupped his palm on her behind. Two soldiers did the same. Next a soldier got brave and brushed a finger through her muff of golden hair. A fat blond civilian beside him wedged his whole hand palm up between her legs and squeezed. He laughed and then laughed harder as the girl raised her fists to her eyes.

“Dumb fucking German.” yelled a Marine who sprang up wielding a bottle, and while the other man cheered him, he flew across a table and crashed his bottle over the civilian's head, but the fat boy still clutched one hand on the girl until she broke free and ran to disappear through the curtain behind the stage. A dozen cheated gringos attacked the civilian, yelling and pounding him good before all ten or so fellows from around the bar, most of them shouting in German, jumped the Marines. Bouncers flew from out of nowhere, mestizos and two large blonds, lashing with blackjacks and clubs.

Hickey'd stepped back out of the light to sit with Clifford and watch the brawl. In a minute the bouncers were herding the troops toward the exit. The kid sat rigidly, right hand clutching around his beer bottle, left hand pinching the table edge.

“Whew," Hickey said. “She’s a beauty all right. I guess you got reasons to fall for her." He touched the kid’s shoulder. “But see, she's not real. She just looks like an angel. You know she's gotta be a tramp."

Clifford snarled something that got lost in the noise of waiters clearing tables, throw ing glasses into trays. Hickey leaned closer. Figuring he’d been cussed, he growled. “What’s that you say?"

The kid pulled from under his coat and belt a little .22 pistol, sneaked it under the table, and pressed it onto Hickey’s thigh, then sprang up with a bigger gun of his own, a .45 that had been strapped to his armpit and now hung at his side as he walked stiffly, over fallen chairs, around tables, straight as he could toward the stage.

Grabbing the .22, Hickey leaped up. bounded over furniture and caught Clifford by the scruff of the neck. The kid tried to shake him off. lunging toward the stage. “Wendy." he screamed. “Let go. Pop! Wendy!"

The blue light flashed, then a volley of blows glanced off Hickey 's neck and head before he fell with a pain that stabbed dow n his back and loosed >torm in his brain. Yet he got the little .22 into the deep pocket of his MP trousers, just as a fist, wearing a large golden ring, crashed his right jaw. It jolted all the way down to his knees. For a minute things only buzzed and sputtered. Until he heard Clifford yell. “Pop, where’d you go?"

They were on the sidewalk now, each dragged by two bouncers. When they let go. Hickey landed on his belly with his right arm underneath. Slowly, he wormed his hand down until it touched the .22. He found his grip. Nudged off the safety. Slid the pistol free of his belly, slowly rolled over, jerked up (he gun. and squeezed. The blast echoed down the alley. A bouncer heaved back over a stack of cardboard and into the stucco wall.

Rising to his feet as if the ground were a rowboat at sea, Hickey spotted nobody with a gun drawn. He waved his pistol and ordered the Mexicans to face the wall. The shot one still lay on the cardboard, moaning, cursing in German, clutching his thigh.

Suddenly the kid was leaning, dead weight, on Hickey’s shoulder. “Make ’em get Wendy. Pop."

“No time. In a minute there'll be cops."

“I gotta try, though.”

Before Hickey found the sense to grab him, the kid went stumbling toward the street. Hickey lunged that way. on impulse. But he couldn't at once chase the kid and disarm these goons.

He collected five guns, while the big Mexicans took turns slinging wisecracks and insults at him. in Spanish, and sniggering at each other’s wit.

The runt leaned against the wall, humming then whistling a jazzy tune, an upbeat number you might hear at a parade. He turned from gazing at the sky to give Hickey a grin, when the kid ran into the alley and wailed. “Pop, she ain’t there."

Hickey snapped awake to the pain dow n from his eye meeting one shooting up from his jaw. Together they bellowed like a pair of tubas. He got up and swallowed a few aspirin. But he couldn’t drift off again, with the night in TJ come back to haunt him.

He should’ve known better than to get near any messes, the way this whole year had gone. Nineteen forty-three had sunk to hell about a day after it started, when he came home from work to his place on the way and found a letter folded into H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, which he’d been reading.

• Dear Tom,
• It’s not that you’re a bad guy. But I’m 34. I need another chance before it’s too late. See. we’ve got nowhere in 15 years. I give up. I mean, you’re a three-time loser.
• First the orchestra. You were a damned good bandleader, except you had to play what you liked instead of what the crowd wanted to hear. And of course you wouldn't kiss the right behinds. Then, you could’ve been the richest cop in L.A., a guy with the smarts and charisma like you had, who knew all the nightclub boys, but you wouldn’t play the game. We could’ve had that mansion you used to promise me. No, you throw in your cards with old Leo, the next biggest loser, and drag me and Liz to this hick town. Two years we live like peasants. Then you get a shot at the steakhouse.
• When you met Paul Castillo, it could’ve been the big break. Finally you get teamed up with somebody who knows how to beat the odds. I mean, what in hell does it matter if Paul had to pay off some guys and use a little muscle to get you the best meat in town? Rationing’s just a setup. Another way the smart boys make their fortunes. And it could’ve made us rich too. But you are so damned noble. Like you always have to show off, lending money, buying people things so everybody will slap you on the back and say Tom's a prince all right.
• Well, maybe you are, but this time it cost you dear. Today Paul sold the steakhouse, building and all. I’m leaving you our house, to help cover your losses. You can raise a few grand for the dump, enough to get that sailboat or mountain cabin you always dreamed of.
• Sure, you'll want to kill me. That’s one reason I’m staying with Paul, he’s at least as tough as you, and twice as shrewd.
• Well, good-bye, my darling. It’s too bad. We used to make beautiful music. Of course I’m taking Liz. Where I go. she goes.
• Love,
• Madeline

Hickey would’ve fought back for his daughter. But he hadn’t even finished a two-week drunk when Uncle Sam jumped in. Saw him down and figured it was the right time to kick him. January 10 his draft notice came. Even though a year earlier, the week after Pearl Harbor, he’d tried to enlist — even knowing it might keep him from Elizabeth for the six or eight months everybody figured they’d need to smash the Axis — but they’d turned him down. He was a borderline diabetic, 36 years old. But when enough boys had died, by 1943. when the supply of young sacrifices became less than the demand, Hickey’s faults got forgiven.

It might've been history's ugliest year, with half the world burning and shooting at each other and kids like Wendy Rose getting preyed on by rats like the one Clifford said had brought her over the border and dealt her into some kind of slavery there.

Or, Hickey thought, maybe the kid was lying. Maybe his sister was down there on her own.

The drizzle rattled on the barracks’ tin roof. A few other MPs snored at the end of the room. They’d woke Hickey, stomping in drunk a couple hours before. On his way to the shower he kicked each of their bunks, hard. After a shower, he finished dressing in his MP uniform, gathered what he needed into a bag.

He walked to the Pier Five Diner, swallowed a roll, a boiled egg, four cups of black coffee, then smoked his old briar. When his head felt clearer, he walked a few blocks up Market Street, turned down Fifth. He passed a line of service boys that stretched a half-block from the Hollywood Burlesque theater. At the corner of Fifth and Broadway, he climbed three flights of stairs to an office door lettered HICKEY AND WEISS, INVESTIGATIONS, unlocked and opened it, went to his desk, took out a Browning .45 automatic pistol in a shoulder holster and folded it between the civilian clothes in his gear bag. He sat down and called his partner Leo at home, asked him to query a federate they knew about the Club de Paris and to give him the number of a German pal of Leo’s. The German was a devout Lutheran who detested Hitler more than he hated the Pope, yet who belonged to the German-American Bund, who were mostly Nazis and sympathizers. Hickey phoned the man, told him enough about Wendy Rose and the Club de Paris to get in return the address of the German’s best friend’s wife's nephew, who had been living in Tijuana a few months now. A coffee planter from Chiapas. Juan Metzger.

The Tijuana police station was a rickety wooden building in the shadow of the jai alai palace and the bullring at the south end of town, two miles from the border, at the foot of Las Lomas where the big shots lived. Cops sat on the long front porch, glaring at the rain, then at Hickey.

Inside were Indians, refugees, all kinds of poor, evil, or luckless folks slumped in chairs or resting on the floor. Some waited for sons or brothers to be released. Others loitered there, out of the storm. The room smelled like pestilence, as if you’d find dead people swept into the comers. Hickey stepped to the desk, gave the clerk a dollar, and asked to see the chief. Soon a fat, bleached secretary cooed, “Senor"

She clutched his arm and led him to the office where Chief Buscamente sat on his desk, wearing a cowboy shirt, a Stetson, and a big pistol on his hip. He was lean, smooth, all Spaniard. From the cocky lips and squinting eyes. Hickey made him as the kind of joker always wanting to help you play the fool. He gestured Hickey to a stuffed chair. Offered a cigarette.

Hickey lit up and started talking. The chief listened intently to Hickey's version of the story Clifford had told on the way to San Diego the night before, about this backward girl being tricked and hustled over the border and turning up onstage at the Club de Paris. “So her brother tried to get to her, and the bouncers worked him over.”

Buscamente dragged on his cigarette. ‘This is a terrible thing, you know. I think the brother is a mean one. He beats her too much. Or does something worse to her. huh? That’s what you think too. no?"

Hickey riled, tapped his foot on the floor until it seemed he could speak without yelling. “The brother’s a good kid. I’ll give big odds he doesn't hit ladies. It’s those caballeros at the Club de Paris who got her scared to death. Maybe on dope. Anyway, she’s a prisoner there."

The chief leaned back and blew smoke, nodding earnestly. “Ah. now I see what you think. You must be a smart one to figure all this out. And you are the police from someplace. And you got a badge and everything, no? And that makes it okay for you shooting this hombre last night at the Club de Paris?" With a hiss, Buscamente opened the door and motioned for Hickey to pass. ‘This brother, this good kid, maybe he don’t tell you about the murder she does. Now, you are going to stay on your side of the line. Anyway, you can’t find the girl. She don't no more dance in the Club de Paris. I’m giving you a big favor, see. Then you call me next week. Comprendes?"

The cop didn't get an answer. And when Hickey started to ask about this murder he’d accused Wendy of, the door slammed. Hickey walked through the miserable crowd, out into the rain, ducked into the cab. and gave Tito the driver the address he had for Juan Metzger, southwest of TJ, between the coast road and the inland route to Playa Rosarito.

They clattered over about ten miles of gravel road all the way around Las Lomas, through olive groves and cotton fields, past a brick foundry, an orphanage, cattle ranches, and the headquarters of Cardenas s army — a base of quonset huts, corrals full of horses, dirt lots jammed with trucks, cannons, artillery, a few tanks, a biplane taxiing along the dirt runway and two others gathering dust.

On the west side of Las Lomas, at Groceria El Portal, they turned up Calle Huerta. Metzger’s place was a middle-sized stucco, three or four rooms, flat-roofed, painted bright green. In the yard were citrus and avocado trees, a cactus garden, no goats, chickens, or pariah dogs. A middle-class neighborhood, common as a blizzard in Mexico. There were screens on the windows and a screened front door. Hickey knocked.

A beauty appeared. Young, tall. a little stocky yet with good curves, and slender, with angular features like a Yaqui or Aztec, along with Spanish grace and hot eyes that met Hickey's straight on.

Hickey asked for Juan Metzger. She opened the screen door cautiously, looked beyond him to the street. In perfect English she introduced herself as Consuelo Metzger. She ushered him to one of two padded chairs and disappeared. Besides the chairs, a small table and desk were the only furnishings. Nothing on the walls. Two children peeked around a comer. Finally. Juan Metzger stepped in.

A smallish, pink-faced, bulb-nosed man. he could've played the butcher or baker in a Dickens novel, Hickey mused. But his accent was thickly Germanic. He smelled of hard liquor. Consuelo brought them each a Suprema and disappeared again.

“I got your name from Herman Frick," Hickey started. "Asked him for somebody who’d know the Germans around here. You guys probably stick together, being in a new place and all?"

Metzger took a long gulp of his Suprema and tried politely to muffle his belch. Hickey began the story of Wendy Rose. He told about Clifford, the police chief, the Club de Paris with its German employees and clientele. He told Metzger he might need an insider's help. Say from a German who wanted his ticket north. If he’d help spring the girl, Hickey could buy him passage over the border, set him up with papers and everything — a guy who owed Hickey a favor worked for Immigration.

Metzger swallowed the rest of his beer, held the bottle out in front of him as if finding the table required too much thought, so he’d wait for the table to appear. He gazed at the floor and out the window, as though nothing Hickey said called for answers.

Just get him talking, Hickey thought. “What brought you folks up this way?”

Consuelo materialized, rescued the empty bottle from Metzger's hand, delivered him a full one. She stood with her back to the wall and listened to her husband's story.

In the remote Mexican state of Chiapas, on Metzger’s coffee finca, New Year's Day, he woke up thinking about Nazis. He'd tried to hold his thoughts far from Germany and its wars. But in December his cousin Franz had arrived, to give speeches for the Reich. New Year's Eve. the German planters had gathered for a party, and Franz told them why the Reich would soon rule the world. He’d explained that their Fuehrer and the High Command had captured an icon, the sword that had pierced Christ's body the day of his crucifixion and had become, through Christ’s blood, a vessel of power. It had belonged to Charlemagne, to all the Holy Roman Emperors. Now the Fuehrer held it.

While most of the Germans had laughed and derided Franz, many others praised him.

New Year’s morning, there came shouts from out front. The door rattled open. Boots stomped over the wood floor and the big dark federale, with whiskers like a bush, tramped into the bedroom. Perez, the jefe from Villa Flores. Consuelo jumped up and yelled at Perez to get out.

When they were alone, Metzger told Consuelo what she already knew, what they'd talked of many times in the last year. He said Perez would surely command them to leave the finca, to go and report to the Capital, where they’d be ordered to stay as long as the government willed. Their land could be stolen by the Indios and left as a socialist commune, an ejido. That was what had happened to Germans in Mexico, in one state after another. But Chiapas was the farthest state south, a land of its own, a wild place, and its Germans had been there for decades. Most had never seen the fatherland. So they’d been spared this far — until Franz arrived with his mad speeches.

Consuelo only wept for a minute or so. Then she lay with her cheek on her husband’s lap and spoke of how, after six years, she’d grown to love this place, the jungle, the smells of coffee, flowers, rain. But poor Juan, she said — all his life was here. She thanked God that he was a brave, wise man who knew how to protect her and the babies. Since last year, Juan had been sending the money they could spare to her sister in Baltimore. Now, from Juchilan, they could sail to Baja California. Where Lazaro Cardenas would leave them in peace.

This fellow was like himself. Hickey thought, a drunk who’d worked hard, loved somebody, gotten kicked around....

“So,” he asked, “can you help me...help the girl out?"

Metzger shrugged, sighed deeply, placed the heels of his hands on his eyes. “There are madmen in Tijuana. My cousin Franz has come here.” Metzger looked at Consuelo, for another cerveza. for help sending Hickey on his way? Or both. Then he leaned back into the stuffed chair, stiffly as though he might as well die.

As Consuelo showed Hickey to the door, he gave her a business card and thought what a lucky fellow this Metzger was, having a wife so rare, who kept him alive. That German better snap out of his funk, Hickey thought, before she walks, leaves him there to aim a gun at his ear. hitch his finger and pull.

Tito sped to the border, dropped Hickey off at Coco’s Licores, where he got a bottle then crossed the line with a few minutes left before his duty. In the office shack, he dialed his partner's home number.

“Leo. What'd you get from Ruiz?”

“Guess."

“Christ,” Hickey muttered. “Be kind, will you.”

“Right. Santiago del Monte's the richest guy in Baja. The old man's got eight sons. And they got cousins. The mayor, the police chief, the governor’s right hand. He’s also chummy with a Kraut name of Zarp, owns a bar called Hell. And. Santiago plays cards with Lazaro Cardenas, every Tuesday night.”

Hickey made a couple phone calls, arranged for an MP who owed him a favor to replace him at nine. As he stood at the gate reminding Gls that a case of syphilis could get them docked a month’s pay, while penicillin was free in the clinic shack, he kept remembering Zarp, the German who owned the bar called Hell, where Hickey’d killed one evening.

A big man. dark in a Nordic way—a hulking, brooding fellow. He reminded Hickey of something he'd read about the ancient Celts — that only in battle could their spirits, besieged on all sides by demons, find a sort of repose.

At nine, Hickey walked to Coco’s, bought a liter of anis for Luz. She liked that stuff and it sweetened her breath. He caught a cab. then lounged in the back seat, uncorked his bottle, nursed it, and thought about Luz's breasts that he could burrow between, and the thick hair cascading over his face when she got on top, so all he could see was the shadow of her face, and that swell hair, and soon the rest of the world was beyond the moon somewhere. Then he’d forget the sorrows, dangers, dreams he needed to give up on. He'd forget to long for Madeline and kick himself in the heart for loving somebody who’d betrayed him. somebody he tried every day to hate, for stealing his daughter.

Crossing the east mesa on the border road, as you started down the grade, the first thing you saw was the Pacific. Bigger than the sky, it glowed dark emerald with streaks of red in the moonlight. There were tiny ships, dark currants, clouds like puffs of smoke passing in front of the moon. Straight below on the coastal plain lay the marshland and sloughs of the river, and just south of the border, the town of Las Playas, a thicket of run-down hotels, bars, derelict mansions.

The place was up sandy roads about two blocks back from the seacliffs. It was built of scrap wood and tar paper, with chicken wire instead of glass for windows.

Hickey paid the cabbie, got out, stood for a minute listening to the crash of waves and shouts from the Casino de Lux. He stepped to the door, gave a holier and waited, then reached through a disguised hole and unhooked the latch. He went in and tossed his duffel bag beside the mattress. He looked around, grumbled, walked back out, and turned down the road toward the cliffs, suddenly thinking about Leo, Tito, Wendy Rose. Any of them could be in a jam, while he was coming to get laid.

The Casino de Lux was an old barn next to a bullring that had been part of a rancho before the war. Now there were afternoon bullfights, roosters jousted at night, and Sundays they brought in pit bulls since the pariah dogs they tried would just lie down and make peace. You couldn't rile dead spirits.

The air was thick with fishy smells and mildew from straw on the dirt floor. Around the ring stood a couple dozen gringo troops, half that many girls, a few Mexican caballeros, and a platoon or so of Mex soldiers from their fort just south of the Playas. They wore fatigues and kept their rifles beside them — a couple weeks before, Cardenas had placed the coastline on 24-hour alert, suspecting a Jap invasion. Mixed through the crowd you saw refugees of the kind who wouldn’t grieve too much for the homeland, since they’d escaped Antwerp or Prague with a bankroll. The men and the whores yelled for blood and money. The cocks ripped each other’s feet off. They flew, screeched, beat their wings like they’d gone berserk from wanting to become real birds and fly. As Hickey pushed through the crowd, he paused to watch the banty lunge at the Polish cock’s gizzard.

Finally he caught sight of Luz's thick, shiny hair. She was holding the arm of a Marine. Hickey scowled and started that way. He pushed his way through, getting cussed by the sailors he bumped. Then he grabbed her shoulder. She turned fast, panting.

“Ay, Tomas."

The Marine spun around. A corporal with battle scars, as though he'd caught a fist or two with his lips. He bared his teeth, then sighted Hickey's MP armband and turned back to the roosters. Luz slid past Hickey and started tugging him out through the crowd. On the way she got pinched and goosed, and she tongue-lashed one sailor until his chin quivered and eyes misted, but outside, she gently laid her head on Hickey’s shoulder as they strolled up the sandy road.

“Where you are for 11 days? I think you don’ love me, no?”

“I got you a present."

“Aw, mi amorcito." She hugged tighter against him.

When they got to her place, she stepped to the table that was an old crate and lit a votive candle. Above the candle on the wall, a crucifix hung and beside it a picture of Jesus with flat black eyes that followed you everywhere.

Hickey got the anis from his duffel bag. and Luz took it with a flourish, blowing him a kiss and dancing a spin around the room. Then she leaned toward him and whisked off her blouse and skirt as if they were bandages that itched.

He flopped on the mattress, the only furniture except the crates and a low table with a small gas cookstove, some canned food, a bottle of water. He got out his pipe, loaded, fired it up. and watched Luz as she stood naked brushing out her hair and gazing down at him. He smiled at her pendulous knockers, flat belly, slender hips, all that black wavy hair, and those heart-shaped lips blowing kisses at him. making his brain steam.

“Don’ you lay down7”

“Yeah,” he said, and sat there smoking. She came and sat beside him. She took off the MP armband, the tie and shirt. With one hand she fingered his hair in back where it still was thick. Her other hand rubbed his chest. She kissed his forehead lovingly now, lingering, not a whore job like the first couple times.

He took a swallow of mescal. ‘Tell me something — you know a guy. Senor Zarp? Owns a bar called Hell."

She pulled her hands off him, squeezed them between her thighs. “I know he kills a girl, Carmencita, up there."

“Whoa — up where?"

’The bar called Hell, hombre. For the goddamn men!”

“Like a show, you mean.”

“For the goddamn pinche cabrones ricos! ” She put a hand across her mouth and muttered, “And those goddamn Nazis.”

“Wait now, doll. I been there, and it looks tame compared to stinkholes like the Blue Fox and the Club Paris."

“You don’ go upstairs.” She reached for her bottle and took a long pull, swished it around in her mouth, spit it out on the dirt floor.

Hickey nodded and muttered, “I can fix that."

He jumped up. grabbed his shirt, threw it on. and strapped on a .45 and holster, while Luz watched him savagely. Finally she gnashed her teeth and screamed. “You don’t go there."

“I’m looking for a girl that disappeared.”

Luz dropped her hands. Her lip curled into a sneer. “You don’ go watching the show?"

“Yeah, I don’t."

Slowly, she got up and hugged him. Hickey said, “If I don’t show up by midnight, go to Las Brisas and find an old gringo named Leo. He’s gonna meet me there.”

He eased away from her, grabbed and pocketed his mescal, then walked out and hurried down the road toward the Casino de Luz.

On the bright yellow building, the upstairs windows were shaded, but from alongside one shade came a strip of flickering reddish light and running down from that same window a fire-escape ladder hung.

At 11:05, Hickey stepped carefully down the hill, looking out for cops and other dangers. Ahead on the narrow street lit only by the moon, he couldn't see anybody except a gang of drunk sailors climbing the hill and trying to whoop like Mexicans. Then, as he crossed the street a block up from Hell, he spotted the doorman out front and the cop resting on a porch across the street.

Hickey stepped back into the dark by the door to a medical clinic where poor gringos got their teeth pulled and their offspring aborted. He waited while the sailors stumbled up the hill and into a tattoo parlor. Finally the doorman went back inside Hell. The cop sat gazing downhill. Hickey eased out to the dirt sidewalk and crept, staying close to the buildings until he reached the passway between Hell and the bakery next door. It was a stinking passway about eight feet wide. His feet slipped on moldy trash. Three cats and a gang of smaller creatures scattered out of his way just as he reached the base of the fire-escape ladder.

When he grabbed hold, it rattled loudly. He stepped back, looked around, up, stood listening for a minute. Then he held the ladder gently and started to climb, his right hand pulling while his left stayed on the gun. He got five rungs up and saw that the next three were missing.

He cussed in a whisper, shimmied down, stood a minute with his eyes keened, finally turned to the bakery next door, a one-story place with a flat roof. After sloshing through the crud to the rear of the buildings near the comer of the bakery, he found an oil drum full to the top with ashes packed down hard by the rain. He muscled it over next to the wall, inches at a time — it must’ve weighed 300 pounds — then he climbed onto the drum and grabbed the eaves of the roof. When they started to crack, he let go and caught hold of a sturdier place. Then he pulled, strained, and got up. The roof was too rickety to walk on. So he crawled along the edge on the wall line, about 30 feet before he reached the spot across from the upstairs window toward the front of Hell. Now he had to stand and focus through the flickering light on the space down the side of the windowshade.

What he saw looked so weird, he reached for his glasses.

A naked man lay on his back on a long wooden table. A red mask covered his face. His hair was slick and blond, arms lay flat alongside his slim waist and hips. He might’ve been dead, except for the giant erection. Behind him stood another, higher table, and on it a cactus in a gold pot. and a golden cross entwined by a serpent, about three feet high. Beside that stood a crystal pitcher full of red.

Hickey felt knocked off balance, as if the building shook. His legs kept tipping, but he held still, waiting for the man to rise or do something. Then came the sound like a chant, low and muffled through the walls and windows of Hell. Eerie, dense, harsh words, maybe Latin.

Hickey's mind wound tighter, higher until he pulled his gun and sighted on the blond man's erection. A tremor ran down his neck and arm to his trigger finger. He stood like that for a couple minutes while his hand twitched and he conjured pictures of the stiffs rod exploding. He made himself chuckle at the sight, trying to release some pressure from inside him. Until the girl appeared.

With steps as slow as a wedding march, she crossed in front of the window, her head bowed. You couldn’t see her features from where Hickey stood, only the ivory skin. She wore a shiny scarlet-and-rose-colored dressing gown.

Hickey's gun dropped to his side, and the girl passed out of sight. A few seconds later she stepped behind the table, moved in front of the cross, slowly reached up to the crystal pitcher. She took it in both hands and stood a moment facing the cross. Then she turned toward the body on the table.

She poured a little of the red stuff on his chest. The body quivered. She replaced the pitcher on the high table and turned once more to the body. Lightly, with her fingertips, she traced the red stuff into lines on the man’s belly. He quivered harder as though convulsing. Wendy stepped back out of sight. A few seconds later she passed the window, head down, walking slowly back the way she’d come.

Soon a big man in purple robes, his rear to the window, came and threw a white robe over the blond stiff, who slowly quit shaking, got up, and left the scene, led by the big man. Zarp.

Hickey watched a few more minutes, but nothing passed, and the chanting stopped. He laughed, quietly, fiercely. What he needed now was a tangle with Luz, to get that black mass off his mind. Then a little mescal, and sleep. Maybe he’d dream of Elizabeth. Something innocent, to help him lose this picture of Wendy Rose smearing blood on that quivering German stiff.

In the morning Hickey closed his bank account to finance the battle. Afterward, he secured an arsenal from his pal Smythe, a lieutenant in Ordnance. Leo recruited a tough named McColgin, an ex-heavyweight wrestler the Marines had discharged for excess meanness. Using 500 of Hickey’s dollars, Tito gathered his compadre Enrique Pena, Enrique’s son Rafael, and his twin younger brothers, Teodoro and Isidore.

Just past 8:45 that evening, Leo Weiss’s Packard eased around the corner, off Revolution to Calle Siete. It pulled to a stop where the sidewalk turned to dirt in front of the dental and abortion clinic that was closed for the night. The only places open for a long block either way were Hell on the south side 100 yards downhill from the Packard and the tattoo parlor on the north side a halfblock up the hill.

Hickey jumped out from the shotgun side of the Packard and loped across the street, to the dark beneath an apartment balcony. From there he had a straight view to Hell. Upstairs, some lights burned. In the window toward the rear of the building, a reddish glow bled through the shades and down their edges.

There were only a few pedestrians. A couple strolling toward the river. A few sailors wandering up from the Gub de Paris. A beggar woman with a gang of kids tagging behind, snooping in trash cans and gutters. The cop on the porch across the street from Hell looked awake, but just barely. And there was the doorman.

Hickey waited until the doorman glanced away down the hill, then he hustled back across the street. He looked up the hill for the giant to come around the corner and give him a wave, telling him the Jeep was parked and ready on Revoluci6n. But McColgin didn’t show yet. Hickey slid into the Packard. The kid moved over. He sat with both hands under his coat, one hand on the pistol, the other on the gas mask. Whenever he glanced at Hickey, a grimace tightened his face. When he turned away, it became a vicious snarl, and his hands squeezed the mask and pistol brutally. In the front seat, Tito sat puffing on a brown cigarette. The smoke seeped out between his clenched teeth. Enrique kept busy popping his knuckles and watching out the back window.

“Hey. Hey." Tito slapped the seat “There he is.”

Blood gushed to Hickey’s brain. He waited for the ebb, then checked his guns, the pistol at his chest and the M-1 rifle on the seat beside him. He checked his mask and the tear gas chamber. “Let's move, andale."

He started out and waved up the hill. McColgin disappeared behind the comer and Hickey came around the back of the car to Tito. He motioned toward the driver and said, ‘Tell him one more time — he doesn't move from here till after we go in. When the shooting starts, he gets down there fast.” Tito gave a nod. then leaned into the car and talked to the driver, while Hickey turned to Clifford. “Got it straight? Keep your head?”

“I think so, Pop.”

By now the sailors had walked out of sight up the hill and the beggar with her kids had passed Hell and turned into an alley. Tito opened the trunk. Hickey and the kid stepped back there. Each of the three men took out an M-1 and stuck it under his coat with the butt hitched into a loop roped around his belt and the barrel pointed high. Hickey eyed the kid one last time and chucked him on the arm. Then Tito shut the trunk quietly.

On the far sidewalk, Leo came edging down the hill close to the buildings. Hickey's partner looked slow, dumpy, with a gray walrus mustache and wrinkled eyes. About when Leo got to the tattoo parlor, McColgin stepped around the comer, ran across the road, and followed the old man. 50 or so yards behind. Hickey gave a last encouraging look at the kid and ran over to Leo. They raised their eyebrows at each other and stood there a few seconds while Hickey keened his eyes down the hill and saw nobody except the cop who slouched on the porch gazing toward the moon, the chauffeur of a Cadillac limo, and the doorman who was fussing with something on his hands.

Hickey and Leo walked side by side down the hill, stiffly because of all the weapons, off the concrete where it ended, along the shoulder, and across the dirt side street About 50 feet past the intersection, Hickey stopped. Looked around once more. Still no innocent folks came walking, and the only car that moved was down past the Club de Paris near the river.

Hickey raised one arm high. A moment later, McColgin cut diagonally across the road toward Hell, stumbling to act like a drunk, as the Jeep wheeled around the comer from Revolution, full of Mexicans and with two high ladders sticking up — it bounded down the hill and came alongside Hell about the same time McColgin staggered up to the doorman. At the same moment. Leo and Hickey moved on the cop.

As the cop’s face turned, he looked robust and friendly, until he saw the gringos, one with a rifle aimed at his gut, the other with a silenced Colt .45. The cigarette fell from his mouth, and he made his last mistake — he reached for his gun. Hickey shot him twice. You heard only pfft sounds like wine bottles opening — then a deadpan moan as the cop rolled onto his side, one hand grabbing his chest where the bullets sucked in, the other hand flying from the butt of his pistol up toward the sky. Then Leo was on top of him. throwing a gag on the man’s mouth and rolling him over to tie it But the man was gone. His back looked like a squashed dog in the road.

Hickey stood there, a little dizzy as he stared at the cop. Somebody zipped past him — Tito running to the Cadillac. Somebody else came sprinting by. Clifford Rose.

The window got halfway up before Clifford’s rifle barrel knocked the chauffeur's cap off and put a gash in his skull. He threw his arms in front of him, fists under his chin, while Tito jumped in on the passenger side and rammed the silencer of a .45 to his ear. Tito pulled the chauffeur out and to the ground.

The street was quiet. The loudest sounds were drunken gringos hollering a few blocks away, drums from a boulevard nightclub, and a mariachi chirping falsetto. The Jeep took off with the captives, down the hill toward the river where Rafael would make sure they got tied well enough and dropped out on the riverbank.

Hickey crossed the road on a diagonal toward the uphill side of the bakery. The whole gang except Rafael gathered around him. He rubbed his eyes, which still saw the bloody cop. Then he looked at the kid, winced, and snapped. “Where’s your rifle?’

Clifford stared, deranged fora second, panting through his nose. Finally he spun around and ran across the street to the Cadillac, grabbed his M-1 off the hood, and ran back to the others.

Hickey told them to stay put. He crept down past the bakery and stood at the comer of Hell, listening. An African rhythm came out of the place, a conga and a tom-tom, along with the noise of chattering, laughter, and harsh, shouted words. All from downstairs. He moved to beneath the side upstairs window toward the front and stood beside the ladder. After a minute he started to make out a deep voice in Spanish, like the railing of a preacher.

He stepped to the sidewalk, waved, moved back into the passway. When the others got there, he snarled, “Let’s go get her," and moved toward the street. Gifford jumped out and followed. Hickey pushed him back toward the ladder. “You climb up there, remember?’ he snapped. “And don’t make a move till I fire. Then smash the window, jump in, run for Wendy and grab her and get out the door. Fast. Understand?’

The kid nodded vaguely. Yet Hickey couldn’t wait another second. He moved to the comer of the building and waved McColgin ahead as they’d planned. Hickey came next, then Tito. Leo held the rear. They paused for a second, single file at the door. Then McColgin burst in, bellowing, waving the machine gun, and Tito ran past him, jumped on the bar, and stuck his rifle on the bartender’s nose before that one could hit the alarm bell to upstairs.

The room was full of blond whores, sharply dressed, wiry Mexicans, Okie stevedores. Marines who’d sneaked over the border dressed like civilians, a few of Cardenas’s army, Indian waiters, and three bouncers — yet nobody argued with the giant who waved a machine gun, whooping as he jumped up and down.

Hickey ran over and grabbed the giant’s arm. “Cut out the damned yodeling!”

Then he caught up to Leo, passed the old man, and stopped before the stairs. From a scabbard on his belt, Hickey pulled a bayonet. He snapped it onto his rifle. He stabbed through the curtain and jumped to the stairs with the bayonet out, ready to stick the guard he imagined would be on the landing. But there was no guard. Hickey charged up the stairs, and Leo trudged behind. When Leo reached the landing. Hickey kicked the door, yelling, “Freeze, cabrones!”

As he fired into the room, high so the bullets powdered the ceiling. Clifford and Isidore burst through the windows. The kid's M-1 jerked spastically and his face looked purplish through the incensed light

A long, mahogany table stretched the length of the room. Around it in padded chairs of soft, tucked leather sat a dozen men in military officer uniforms.

Scarlet campaign hats with gold braided bands. Suits of dark, velvety blue with gold clusters on the shoulder, golden stripes around the sleeves, and large gold buttons everywhere. Not one man had dark skin. Half of them were blond. They aged from around 30 up to one ancient man. Santiago del Monte, Hickey suspected — the patriarch. The way his hat perched showed his pointed head. He looked shrunken except in the long neck and bulging hazel eyes. In a rage he lunged forward and jabbered commands as if nobody held guns on them. About halfway down the right side of the table a young blond fellow Hickey recognized hissed curses in German. At the far end. at the head of the table, wearing a big golden star on his hat, Zarp stood flanked by a tall, husky blonde with naked breasts. She held a gold tray of golden cups, until they dropped.

With a strange grin and a pitch like joy in his voice. Clifford cried out, “Where is she?’ and wheeled his rifle at Zarp, who stood just a few feet away.

“No!" Hickey yelled.

In a flash from a holster at his side. Zarp drew a big automatic and fired three rapid shots. The right side of Clifford Rose’s head flew off. It splattered on the wall beside the window he’d jumped through ten seconds before.

The next shots, from Hickey’s M-1, launched Zarp’s big carcass flying backward. His chair toppled and flipped on its side. He rolled out onto the floor. Then quiet fell. All you could hear was Zarp's growling and a thunk as the young German heaved forward onto the table. Isidore Pefta had cut him down from behind. Yet he began to rise, pushing with his arms on the table. His head angled upward, eyes gleaming, he loosed a howl so miserable, loud, and deep it might’ve cracked windows and terrified neighbors — except Isidore Pefta finished the psycho with two slugs in the neck.

“Whoa!” Hickey shouted. “Jesus!"

Leo gulped a deep, rasping breath and pounded the floor with his heel as he stared at the kid, who never uttered a sound. Clifford jerked a few times and then gave in.

“Guns on the table,” Hickey roared. “Where’s the damned girl?”

Nobody spoke except old Santiago, who kept squawking volleys of curses. But a few eyes turned toward the northwest corner of the room as though to watch the servant girl, who had backed against the wall when the guns fired, and now squatted, huddled in a ball between an icebox and a closet.

As Hickey looked at her, she squirmed a little and leaned against the closet door. Hickey motioned for Isidore to gather the weapons, then stepped over and nudged the servant away from the closet door. He grabbed the handle, turned and pulled it open a crack. He raised his M-1 and used his foot to throw the door open wide.

She was dressed as before in the red velvet robe. Her head was bound in a pouch of leather with drawstrings tied around her neck, only a small hole to breathe through. She was on a chair. Gasping. Her hands folded tightly on her waist.

Hickey leaned his rifle against the wall by the closet door. He reached in and touched the girl’s hands. They gripped tighter together against his touch but loosened after a moment, and she whispered, “An angel."

She rubbed his hand and then squeezed it, tight as she’d held her own, and when he raised her arm she stood. With his left hand he untied the pouch’s leather string and lifted it off her head.

There was her face, bright as ever, glowing a little in the reddish light. Her eyes drifted and sparkled. Her lips quivered. For a minute, Hickey shed his meanness and fury. All the terror left him. He put his left arm around her shoulders and she fell tightly against his side. As he turned her toward the table and the doorway, he picked up his rifle. Then he spotted Gifford lying there. He pushed the girl's head down a 1ittle and turned it so her eyes were against his chest. Too late “My Clifford,” she whispered.

“Don’t look. C’mon, we re getting outta here.”

“My Clifford too.”

Hickey shut his eyes and tried to think. Finally he hollered. “Leo, you guys get the kid outta here. Then come back for the girl.”

“No use, Tom. He’s dead as they come.”

“Do it anyway!”

“Well, who’s gonna watch ’em?’

“Me!" Still holding the girl, Hickey moved back his coat, hitched the rifle to his side, pulled his .45, and leveled it around the table. So Isidore, and finally Leo, hitched their rifles too and came around to the kid. For a minute they gazed down at Clifford. Then the Mexican hoisted the feet, Leo the shoulders. Blood poured down Leo’s right leg from where the kid’s ear and temple used to be. Leo began moaning, “Aw, Lord, no," and kept on every time he looked at the kid, as they dragged him out and down the stairs.

The girl cinched both arms around Hickey as he watched the table, the pistol following his eyes, which kept drifting to where Zarp lay a couple yards from his feet, still except when he made little grunts of breath. If not for the girl, he sure would've made Zarp's head like Clifford's. But she clung to him so tightly that he trembled with her. With each of her breaths, a little shudder and moan escaped. She squeezed so hard he could feel her cool skin through the velvet robe. It made him wild with tenderness — like years ago when he first held his newborn daughter — but now at the same time a part of him kept raging. And another part of him looked at the gold. The chalices and um. It seemed he remembered them from some time long past. He stared at the golden cross with its tw ined serpent, at the men’s coat buttons and shoulder bars. For a moment he got so lost in Wendy and the gold that when he heard noise on the stairs, he wheeled enough to get off shots at the door.

Leo yelled. “Hey. spare me, you goddamn boob." He and Isidore stood in the doorway. “Okay, whatta we do now?"

“Take her down," Hickey said.

The Mexican slipped by and ran around the table. Old Leo dragged behind, panting. He finally got there and hooked the girl’s arm but couldn't peel her off Hickey, the way she had fastened like a noose around his waist. And her little moans came higher, faster.

“I’ll take her then. You hold these guys.” Hickey glared around the table. "Waste ’em all, if you feel like. I don’t give a damn.”

Leo made a grim smile and raised his Ml and swept it back and forth along the table, as Hickey led the girl to the door.

On the first few stairs, her feet kept missing. So he lifted her into his arms. She felt light as a spirit. He carried her the rest of the way down and out through the saloon, where the people sat frozen at the bar, around the stage, and at the tables. Some of the men looked ready to cheer. A few whores sat beaming.

When he got through the front door, Hickey saw the jeep waiting across the street and the Packard with Enrique set to drive, parked a few feet away from him. “Where’d they put Clifford?” he yelled.

Enrique pointed at the Jeep.

He shoved the girl into the back seat of the Packard and had to get tough and shake her to make her let loose of his side. Then he stood on the curb and yelled, full loud, “Now, Leo!"

A few seconds later came screams from upstairs as Leo let go the tear gas. In another few seconds when the tear gas blew downstairs, the screams became a legion. Then Leo hobbled out and nose-dived through the open rear door of the Packard. He pushed Wendy to the middle. Hickey jumped in on the left side, while Tito sprinted past the Packard and across the street and sprang into the Jeep, with Isidore following. McColgin. the last of them, spun around and beat his chest, gave a cowboy whoop, and piled into the front of the Packard.

Hickey shouted, “Vamonos!”

The Packard rumbled down the hill.

They had reached the first cross-street, three long blocks from the river, when they heard sirens. Nobody had sense enough to figure which way they were coming from. Hickey was far gone, sitting still as granite, feeling as though parasites gnawed his insides from the skull down.

"Make a left!” Leo yelled.

The police car sped out of the cross-street just uphill from the Club de Paris. Another one followed, zoomed out from behind the Packard, in front of the Jeep, which leaned one way. then the other, and swerved and crashed through the wall of an upholstery shop. Gunfire rattled, fading as they sped on toward the river. Leo rested his face in his hands and groaned. The Packard slowed down, almost to a stop, with Enrique Pena's head out the window. Leo pointed and said. “This guy’s kid’s back there.”

“So’s every cop in Tijuana." McColgin said. “But, I bet they ain’t got one of these." He lifted the Thompson gun, aimed it through the window, and fired a burst at the sky. “C’mon, you old farts, let’s take ’em!"

Everybody stared at Hickey. Leo. Enrique, with a hand over most of his face. Even the girl, her eyes sparked with fear.

Hickey didn't know - given 100 years and a clear head, he still wouldn't know the answer. What finally came out of his mouth wasn’t from his brain. Maybe from his heart.

“We’re taking the girl to the border!"

The driver bowed his head, crossed himself, turned around and drove. He slid left onto the river road and gunned it while McColgin leaned out the window blasting the moon and stars. They swerved through deep sand, then Enrique bent forward and slugged his head on the steering wheel.

Leo reached over, touched the driver’s arm. “So they take ’em to jail, we’ll get ’em out. That’s a promise."

Enrique just sped faster over the craggy dirt, nits, and washboard. By now the girl had quit moaning, yet she pressed Hickey as though rooted there with her cheek hard against the front of his shoulder. Her face lifted up. In a voice gentle as a Brahms tune, she asked, “Where is my Clifford?”

Hickey couldn't say it. He just stared at her face, like none he’d ever seen but closest, in his eyes, to Elizabeth’s, when she was a child who got hurt and needed him.

The girl’s lips parted and crooked into a smile. “Is he —in — Heaven?”

Hickey shaded his eyes. “Yeah."

She drew back her arms from around him, put her hands on his chest, and beamed. “Oh — can we go there tomorrow?"

They were nearing the bridge. Sirens wailed again. You couldn’t tell from where. There might be a roadblock. Hickey didn't give a damn, not about anything except holding Wendy Rose. He squeezed her tight as a lover.

On the drive downtown, Hickey said, ‘The girl’s a treasure. Leo. I watch her and think, nobody’s this honest, everybody’s a little phony, nobody’s got this much heart.”

Leo said. “Looks to me like you’re stuck on her. Control yourself, Tom. Don’t go getting sympathy confused with love. She's a kid, a moron kid, and you never been the kind's gotta take any skirt he can get."

"I'm not too sure she's a moron."

"Yeah? What is she then?"

"Don't know. Seems like her brain dreams off. Not stupid. Punchy though. Maybe she's gotten socked too many times." Punchy, the way he felt right now, with his brain zinging off to visions of Clifford's bloody head. Zarp writhing on the floor of Hell, Hickey's conscience filled with the noise of gunshots, sirens, screams. Suddenly all went quiet and he saw Wendy running across the beach in white and polka dots, kicking up sand, jumping and clapping as the shore break got her in the knees. Soon that vision blurred to a room full of gold. One he'd seen almost 20 years ago. The memory that had flashed last night in Hell, of a room in the old Agua Caliente Casino. A salon full of golden statues, candlesticks, plates and bowls, two golden chandeliers, displays of jewelry and knickknacks, all polished to shine like noonday.

Just as they reached the door to their office, the phone quit ringing. Leo thought it might’ve been his contact with the federales. So he got on the phone to a Mexican operator, repeated the number four times, swatted his hat on the desk. ‘‘Ruiz? Yeah. What’s up?...Yeah, sure...Who says?” Leo’s free hand wadded paper from a notepad and shot baskets into the far trash can. “What’s the story on those guys?...Which del Monte?...That’s all you got?...Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Ruiz.”

Leo hung up, sat on the desk, and leaned close to his partner, then closer. His mouth pulled back grimly. “Four new stiffs down there.”

Hickey muttered, “Four,” and looked at his pipe a long time as if he expected a genie to come out and fix everything.

Then he stuffed it full of Walter Raleigh. Slowly. Took a match out. Sat still for a minute. And without meaning to, he started to bite his tongue — just hard enough to feel some pain.

Make it real.

“One kraut,” Leo said. “Franz Metzger. One gringo."

He sighed and looked at the door, as if Clifford might suddenly appear. ‘Two Mex fellas. No names yet”

“Four dead men.”

“Yeah and nobody in jail. That means two of our guys got away. Maybe.” Hickey lit a match and sat watching the flame. When it touched his fingers, he shook it out. “Either of the Mexicans have an eye missing?”

“Shit, Tom, any of 'em might've had a lot more than that missing, taking on all those cops. But, yeah — I bet Tito got it. Else he probably would’ve called by now."

“Maybe he did."

“Naw, he’s got my home phone too.”

“Call Vi.”

When Leo reached for the phone, Hickey went back to the window, trying to shift his mind off the dead guys for now, telling himself, You got years to think about them, if you live so long.

Even at 3:30, before the rush, hundreds of pedestrians scurried below. Stockbrokers heading toward the Grant Grille for a shot of pedigree Scotch. Navy wives pouring off the busses, streaming into Woolwotth. Pretty girls from Visalia, Barstow, Cucamonga, running in their wobbly high heels out of the YWCA where they shared little closet-size rooms. In this last year and some since

Pearl Harbor, San Diego had grown to be the most crowded city on earth. You couldn't get a hotel room without bribing a desk clerk, and the Chamber of Commerce had declared, “Don’t come here until after the war."

Yet among all the people down there. Hickey thought, you might not find a gem like Wendy Rose. Even if her brain was split in two.

“He didn't call," Leo said. “So we got nothing left to do but pray for the dead and figure how to pay back your money."

“What else did the federale tell you?"

“Nothing. Just four dead men and not a damned word in the paper."

Hickey let that sink in for a minute. “What’s he make of all those officers up there last night and Zarp in the general getup?"

“Aw, what the hell’s it matter? The kid’s dead. His sister’s okay. And you gotta speed your ass back to the Army. And I gotta go to the john."

As Leo trudged out, Hickey stepped back to the window. Four dead men, he thought, and started seeing them fall. Clifford’s brains flying. Juan Metzger’s brother screaming goodbye. A wave of nausea flooded him. He looked out, focused on the comer of C Street at the sign that said THE GOLDEN LION, where it used to say RUDY’S HACIENDA. Less than four months ago. Until Hickey wised up. found out his partner Paul Castillo had bribed a guy on the rationing board, put some kind of heat on the boss at Central Supplies, the biggest meat packing house, and that was why they were getting half of the grade-A prime beef in town. So Hickey, the loser, who thought you didn’t need to cheat to. make your mark, told Castillo to get straight or get lost. And Castillo got lost, all right.

Less than four months it took for Hickey to study the collapse of his world and realize he was a fool — not a shred of doubt anymore. Not when four dead men lay on his heart, and there was no Elizabeth to cheer him. to make him feel big and generous. In less than four rotten months, his life collapses like Europe.

He gave the wall a light kick, smiled darkly, and turned to meet Leo coming back from the john.

“Now," Hickey said. “What’d the federale tell you about Zarp and those creeps?'

"To forget the whole mess. They’re gonna take care of everything. We're supposed to bury our heads in the sand.”

“Yeah. Swell," Hickey muttered, and went to the phone. He scowled through the bad connections and requests he had to repeat three or four times to the Mexican operator before she understood him. Finally he reached Groceria El Portal, told the clerk to run a message to Juan Metzger. He hung up, looked at Leo, and shrugged.

"What’d you say, Tom?”

“I gave Metzger a choice. Either he can meet us at the border tonight at six, or I’m coming down to his place at seven.”

“You crazy? Go down there, you probably won’t get ten feet before some cop blasts you. Even if you got to Metzger, all you’ll find is the Gestapo wanting to boil you in oil and gnaw your bones.”

“Yeah,” Hickey said. “I know. I’m betting on Metzger. He was already spooked bad. You couldn't reason with the guy. I’m betting a threat's all he can hear."

The Packard trunk door slamming woke Leo. After a minute he followed the others into Sally’s Cafe, a two-table, four-booth place with yellowed walls and tablecloths. Consuelo and the kids took a booth of their own. Leo and Hickey sat across from Juan Metzger. The German dug a pint of tequila from a coat pocket and offered the other men a drink before gulping his own. Hickey studied the man and thought, Metzger’s changed. Now he could look you in the eye, for a second at least His face didn't sag or twitch.

“We are not going back," Metzger vowed.

“Swell. Then you’re gonna need papers, contacts. You want that stuff?" Metzger nodded, and Hickey said, “You got it All you do is tell me what in Christ is brewing down there. Those Nazis, Zarp, the del Montes — are they playing games or for real?”

“Not games." The German’s voice cracked with outrage. “I’ll tell you." He gulped a few breaths, rubbed his brow, and started over. "Today Santiago del Monte called me into his office at the Casa de Oro. There is a very large desk. In front of it are two golden crosses, at least three feet high. On one of them is Jesus, nailed to the cross. On the other is a cobra. And Senor Zarp lies on a couch staring at me. His eyes are red like the devil’s, and he tells me they know I am the gringo-loving coward. The one who sends you to Hell." Metzger shut his eyes, wiped his brow, and finally looked over at Consuelo. She nodded. Her husband took a swallow of tequila, folded his hands.

Santiago screeches, “Ha!” and thumps on the desk with his fist. Then Senor Zarp commands me to remove my clothes and my crucifix and my wedding ring. The door is locked, the window is barred, the guard points a rifle at me. I can do nothing except cross myself and pray to die bravely. I undress... He drew a long breath and squeezed his eyes closed. “My golden crucifix and wedding ring, del Monte orders me to place on the desk. He steals them. He stares at me and laughs.” Metzger's boyish face had reddened and swelled with impotent fury. He reached for his bottle, gulped twice and hissed. "Senor Zarp orders me to kneel in front of the two golden crosses and repeat after him a terrible blasphemy. To the Christ, I am to say, ‘Weak and miserable Jew, God of servants, old woman, beggar, poor lamb. I give you up to slaughter.’" Metzger whispered something more in German, then translated, “I serve the lord of victory, the destroyer of the meek with his sword of burning light and. . .” He covered his face with his hands and sat rigid.

“Whew,” Leo said. "The hell.... Say. I’ll bet you folks are hungry.”

“First I wanta know what those guys are up to,” Hickey demanded.

Throwing his hands out as though in surrender, the German groaned, ‘They are to help the Reich. For this purpose, I hear, somebody close to the Bund will try to overthrow the government of Baja California.” His voice had cracked into a screech. The two gringos, Consuelo and her children, an old couple drinking cafe con leche, Sally the cook — everyone stared at Metzger.

“I’ll be damned,” Leo said.

“Which somebody?” Hickey growled. “Del Monte?”

The German shrugged.

“Cardenas?"

He shrugged again, miserably, and reached out, called for Consuelo. who left the children drinking sodas and came to sit beside her husband and hold his arm. She sat straight and gazed pensively from one man to the other. With Consuelo at his side. Metzger looked taller, younger, proud. Hope appeared in his widening eyes. He asked something in German and she answered, her voice making German sound almost pleasant. He folded his hands on the table and gave Ortuelo a nod, allowing her to speak.

“We don’t believe Lazaro Cardens Is a friend of the devil." She paused, watching Hickey and Leo as if to make sure they understood her English. “Franz boasted he dined with Cardenas, but Franz would say any lie. That is why we don’t believe that Baja will be in German hands by the middle day of April, as Franz boasted. We trust in General Cardenas."

Hickey calculated and mumbled. “This Sunday." He sat pondering until Consuelo touched his arm. When he looked up. they met eye to eye.

“It was you killed Franz?"

A few seconds was all he could hold her stare. His throat got stiff and dry. “Yeah.”

“Franz was a demon," Metzger whispered, and Consuelo nodded fiercely.

“Last night. Upstairs in Hell. Tell me about the gold up there. Chalices. Buttons on the officers’ costumes. Gold bars where stripes ought to be. Who’s passing out the gold?”

Consuelo said, "Santiago del Monte. Do you know of the Casa de Oro?” “Whorehouse for the ricos. In the Lomas.”

Metzger nodded. “Being there, one thinks of El Dorado, the legend of Cibola.”

"How about Cardenas? If he’s on the level, why’s he hang out with the del Montes and why doesn’t he round up the Japs and Germans like he’s supposed to?"

“Whoever his friends are,” Consuelo said hotly, “the General is too humane to imprison innocent people.”

His next question, Hickey didn’t want to ask — from hearing the truth about Wendy Rose, he might wrestle Metzger for the tequila, swill it, then stagger to Coco’s for mescal. "What’d they do to the girl? Why’d they want to keep her so bad?"

Metzger shook his head a long time. “She is beautiful. I don’t know any more. Only w hat Franz told me. I can tell you Senor Zarp has sent people to steal her back.”

Hickey bolted up with Leo right behind him. They bumped into each other, then Hickey fell over a chair, racing to grab the wall phone.

Early the next afternoon, Hickey pocketed Leo’s snub-nosed .45 and led Wendy out to the beach. She’d talked a little over breakfast, to ask Vi what the jam was made of. He wanted to keep her talking. He needed to learn more about her. For both their sakes, he told himself, he should know everything — before he figured the next move.

He decided to risk a question, see how she acted. “Down there in Hell," he said gently, “besides dancing, what’d those guys make you do?"

Wendy seized her head in both hands. Hickey noticed her legs trembling, led her back across the beach. 30 yards to the sea wall. “You don’t have to tell me. Not now.”

“Nor about George?” she whispered.

“George — he’s the guy that brought you to Tijuana, right? And George is dead?”

She kept nodding harder. “I saw him burning.” With a moan as though she'd been kicked in her belly, she confessed, “I stabbed George, Tom Hickey. It’s why the Devil—made me stay in Hell. Two years, he said, and you know — if I ran away with my Clifford, the Devil would bring me back forever. Oh,” she cried, “it’s not two years. He will take me back there now."

Hickey stood up and walked out across the sand. “Nobody's taking you,” he growled. He turned and stared, with his head cocked and his body twisted sideways, as if he’d yell at her. but the next words came softly. “Why’d you stab him?"

Already she'd fallen off the sea wall to her knees, and now she crawled to him across the hot sand and burrowed her knees into the sand at his feet with her head bowed.

“In church. The Devil—he says George will die. Because George tries to stab Mofeto. The Devil says when a body dies he has to save the blood — for anointing the penitentes.” Franticly, she said, “He was the meanest person in the world—George — meaner than Mofeto or Franz. Or the Devil. And he didn't feel. He didn't. I stabbed him fast." She started pounding her thighs with her fists, hard as though trying to drive her feet into the sand. “If I lie, Tom Hickey, God will hate me — but if I tell you, truly, you will take me back to Hell.”

She thrashed her head violently. Hair fell over her eyes, and she had to throw an arm down to brace herself, to keep her from tumbling onto Hickey's feet. He kneeled in front of her. “Nobody’s taking you back to Hell." “Promise," she whispered.

"Promise."

“I thought you were an angel. I’m silly.”

“No, you’re..." Hickey couldn’t think of a word.

She threw her hands up, gripped her shoulders, squeezed her elbows and forearms tight in front of her breasts. “I stabbed and stabbed," she whispered. “He bled on me. Like a — fountain. In my mouth. My hair got full of blood."

Hickey started to reach for her hands but drew back, worried he’d spook her — it looked like she only wanted to touch somebody she thought was an angel. Now she knew he was a man like the rest, like George, like the Devil, all those guys who pawed her at the Paris Club. Or maybe he was worse, the guy who got her brother killed. He couldn’t figure anything to do except curse himself for making her talk. She rocked to both sides, stiffly, and her lips started trembling He couldn't just watch. Maybe, he thought, if he kept her talking until she spilled everything — maybe she could go through hell and come out the other side.

He asked, “George was on the altar? You were gonna anoint him?”

“No. It weren’t time for anointing. It was time to eat the green balls. The red light The captains got so big and red. when they stepped the building shook — we were in the sky.

Please — the Devil told me — and promised — George was already gone, from his body."

“Peyote," Hickey said. “The green balls. They taste awful?”

“Oh yes. Awful weeds."

“And Zarp, the devil; he told you to stab George, right?"

She nodded, and then she was tugging her hair. “I’m sorry," she whispered, again and again, until finally she sprang up and walked, dragging her toes in the sand. Hickey followed. Fifty yards down the beach, three Mexicans sat facing the sea but glancing at him and the girl. They wore khaki trousers, sport shirts, and hats. Hickey reached into his pocket, gripped the .45 he carried, and kept one eye on the Mexicans.

Wendy looked calmer now. She tossed her hair in the wind, walking more loosely, before she turned and stopped square in front of Hickey, nailing him to the spot with her eyes. “I was good to the Devil," she cried. “He whipped me. And he anointed me — every day — I anointed him too.”

She grimaced ferociously, then turned and marched along the tideline, swinging her rigid arms. Hickey stood a moment reeling from the image of her smeared with blood beneath that bloody monster. He looked around for the Mexicans and then caught up with her, socking his fist into his other palm and aching to go back over the line. This time he’d kill the devil.

“You know where he lives? The Devil.”

“Oh, yes. In the gold room.”

“What gold room? Where? Where’s the gold room, then’’"

“You go up the round stairs and down the tunnel."

"Tunnel? Like a cave? That bar down the street from Hell?"

She stopped, exasperated, shaking her head. “In the Presidente’s house.”

“Presidente? Who’s he? Cardenas?”

"I don’t know.” She covered her face, blew out a couple shivering breaths.

He stopped so close his cheek touched her hair and he whispered. “It’s okay, doesn’t matter. Just tell me a little about the gold room."

“It’s full of gold things, that’s all.”

“Lots of gold things?"

"Oh, so much."

He stepped back and with his heel lined a square in the sand, drew his hand across the square, waist high. “It’d fit in a box this big?"

Wendy laughed, the first time Hickey had seen. “Silly." She dragged one bare foot through the sand, marking a square about ten feet wide, then reached above her head, high as her fingers would go.

“Whoa. Okay, w hat kind of gold? Rocks? Bars?”

“Not rocks. Swords, Plates. Dollars. Coins. Many things I don’t know what they are. Candle holders. The bed is gold."

"Even the bed," Hickey muttered.

They stared at each other until both at once turned north and started off along the tideline again. Ever since she’d laughed, Hickey’s mood had kept brightening. Already he'd forgotten about killing the devil. Instead, he’d steal the devil’s gold.

It was a bitch knocking himself out of bed. but Hickey managed, about ten minutes or so after Leo rapped on the door of the Surf and Sand Motel where they were hiding Wendy Rose. The girl didn’t wake up. Hickey washed and then dressed in his uniform. Lightly, he stroked the girl’s hair, threw things into a duffel bag. and went out to meet Leo. who was gabbing with McColgin, one of the girl's bodyguards.

They walked down Mission Boulevard, past the tourist cafes, motor courts, alleys where bums slept, stands where you rented bikes and inner tubes. At Leo’s place, they made coffee, heated rolls. Hickey checked over the list — what Smythe would deliver for half cash, half credit. Two crates of Springfield rifles. Two thousand rounds of ammunition. A half-case of grenades. A couple of Browning or Thompson machine guns and a dozen clips. Three two-way radios.

"Maybe he’ll get us a tank."

“Say you’re joking.” Leo grumbled. “If you get snuffed and run out on the tab. he’ll chase after me to pay it."

“You know, we could make Smythe a partner, cut him in. Then he’d finance the whole deal."

“Cut him in—Tom. the gold’s all in your head. All you gotta look forward to is getting outta there alive and bankruptcy." Leo tapped a Lucky on the table, sipped coffee. “I oughtta get fined just for not lassoing you into a straitjacket. Say. I might do that any minute. Thinking you can steal a mountain of treasure out of Mexico. Acting like Ponce de Leon. that guy that went hunting for the seven cities of gold that never were."

“Wrong guy," Hickey said. “De Leon was after the fountain of youth.”

“Same damn thing." Leo mumbled.

Hickey looked out at the brightening sky. He told Leo to meet him at Sally’s Cafe in San Ysidro at noon.

In the garage, he took a leather sack full of pistols from the Packard, carried the sack and his duffel bag out to the Jeep.

He drove carefully in his vehicle, which the Army and the law might have their antennas out for — down the boulevard, across the Ocean Beach bridge, then keeping to the side roads a mile east of the Navy and Marine bases, and finally to the coast highway. Before the Navy docks, he cut east behind the Santa Fe depot and Lane Field where the Pacific Coast League played baseball, then took A Street all the way up to 10th so he wouldn’t pass near the YMCA. the Greyhound depot, or Horton Plaza where the city buslines connected. You’d always find MPs loitering around those places.

In National City by the shipyards, he met the coast highway again. And, since they’d be watching for him at the border gate, just before San Ysidro he turned east and took a dirt road up onto Otay Mesa. From there he used the smuggler's road. Dope, guns, refugees, refrigerators, hot cars, even stuff like onions when the import tariffs got raised. Both armies patrolled the line up here, but Jeeps were scarce enough so that the patrols mostly used horses, and they rode in squads. You could spot one a mile away.

Somewhere, Hickey crossed the line. Then he made a right turn down a creek bed that ran off the mesa and finally met the river a couple miles east of the shantytown. He pulled up on the outskirts, a wrecking yard and housing project of old, stripped cars, their shells made into family homes. Five small Indians could sleep under the body of a Chrysler. He parked there so the Jeep would be less conspicuous, in case there were cops around. As he jumped down, a gang of ragged, spook-eyed kids charged to surround him and stare. Hickey grabbed his luggage and was walking toward the shacks when a scarred face poked out of the driver’s window of an old green Ford. “Where you been two days, boss? You taking La Rosa to Hollywood?”

Hickey wasn’t apt to hug guys. But he thought, when somebody rises from the dead — as the cabbie stepped out, Hickey grabbed and gave him a ribcracking squeeze. “We figured they got you, else you would’ve phoned."

“Hey, I been hiding. Maybe there's a phone in TJ I can use without nobody sees me, only thing I don’t know where it is. From here I’m watching Coco's and the border. All day and night I been looking for you.”

Hickey backed off a step and muttered. “Who’d they kill?”

“The mellizos. How you say?"

‘Twins?”

"Yeah. They are shot in the back while they running.” He pointed east. “Right there by the river. Somebody puts a cross there already. But Rafael and Enrique, they got away. Yesterday, they are gone already, driving like crazy. Maybe they got to Hidalgo by now.”

Hickey stared at the hills and saw the Pena twins, brave, handsome guys, about 30, no older. Probably had kids. He leaned on the hood of the Ford, watched some Indians walking toward the river, and wondered what kind of louse he was, come down here to risk more lives. You could say life was cheap these days, but he knew better. Yet he picked up his bags and led the cabbie toward the river. They sat on the bank and stared across, past Coco’s, over the border gate. Spots of light glared off a tank and a troop carrier that crawled up the gray-brown hills. The sun was low but already burning like coals on Hickey's brow.

"I guess you oughtta leave town, huh?”

"Puta madre, you bet," Tito groaned. “Why do I go fighting with these del Montes? I make 100 dollars, but my taxi’s junk and I got to go some damn place like Matamoros, pay maybe 300 for a taxi license there and 200 more for a cab, some jalopy. Man, I think I was a smart guy. Now I don’t be too sure. I could go with Rafael yesterday, but I think no, better wait and talk to the boss. Maybe you will be happy about La Rosa and want to pay me what else I need.” “So I oughtta give you about 400 bucks?”

"Five or six, I think.”

“How about seven? You give me a couple days to raise it Or, maybe instead you'd want to go partners. Stealing gold.”

Tito lifted his sunglasses and squinted his weary red eye. "Tell me. The girl says there’s a big cache of gold, somewhere. She says it’s at the house of a guy she calls the ’Presidente.’ I think it’s del Monte, old Santiago, and the gold's at his Casa de Oro. So tomorrow night. I'm going to snatch it” The cabbie put his chin on his fists and asked to hear more. So Hickey told him: a lot of what the girl said; his own idea that plenty of the gold might’ve been swiped, say by del Monte, in the revolution when he rode with Magon, and six years ago when Cardenas, as Presidente. shut down the Agua Caliente Casino; how Zarp could be a Nazi agent; about Metzger and the rumors of a coup.

Tito knocked himself on the brow, folded his hands on top of his head, and stared at the dirt. “I want this gold, de veras. But you going to need a little army. Where you getting one?” When Hickey stood up. motioned with a hand around the shantytown, the cabbie groaned. "These gallinas? Man. they don’t know nothing. What they going to fight with? Machetes. They got a gun, maybe they shooting their balls off."

“Maybe. So, in a couple days I’ll bring you 700 at the gate."

“Sure, boss,” the cabbie hissed. “Some trick. You going to be dead two days before then "

“Think it’ll be a massacre?”

“You know that one. It won’t be like Hell was. They got to have guards, and maybe some of the Army is there with General Cardenas."

“Yeah? Well, how about I give you 50 today, if you help me find some cars and send a guy to scout Las Lomas. Get all the dope we can on the place.”

“Fifty,” Tito snarled. From his green Hawaiian shirt he pulled out a Hershey bar. ripped off the paper, and chomped fiercely. “How much gold you say?”

“Millions, anyway.”

Tito pushed on his head with his hands and spun like he’d corkscrew into the ground. Then he leaned close to Hickey. “I tell you something about I used to be muy guapo, and I got this limo. Women are loving me, boss. Used to be. And I tell you, of everything there is, it’s maybe only women that making me happy. Drinking, dancing, futbol, I don’t care about them no more. Only women. So I’m happy, until this brother of a woman, he calls me names and I call him back. I win, you know. I call him the best name. And he makes me look like this. Now, don’t nobody love me till I’m paying her. I tell you, if I had one woman, maybe three or four ninos and a good taxi, I don’t go with you for ten million pesos. Even dollars. That’s because it’s too crazy and I think we going to die. But goddamn. I got nobody, so maybe anyway I going with you and steal this pinche gold."

Hickey, Tito, and two Yaquis sat in the Jeep, on the crest trail a few hundred yards above the del Monte place. They had evaded the private cops who stood sentry at a gate on the road to Las Lomas by driving farther south, then four-wheeling straight up the hillside.

The Yaquis shared a Coca-Cola. Tito sat holding one of the two-way radios. Hickey put on his glasses.

There were a dozen mansions spaced across Las Lomas, half of them colonials with lots of ironwork and balconies, a few low-slung joints, like mausoleums. Each was surrounded by a high block wall. Between them spread dry land covered with tumbleweeds and sage. Below, to the east, lay the paddock and stables of the racetrack, a quarter-mile from where the Lomas road crossed Revolucidn — by the supper club where Leo’s Packard waited.

The radio crackled, then Leo’s voce barked, ’Tom, my heart’s been thumping too loud, too long. It’ll be tenderized if we don’t get moving soon.”

“Nervous, huh?"

“Sure. I figure if we die and go to hell, it’ll stink like the Club Paris."

“Okay," Hickey said quietly. “We’re gonna wait until you get past the gate and start up the hill. Listen, keep yourself out of the battle, old man — if I get it, you hafta run this crusade. And you gotta take care of the girls, so the least thing goes wrong, or looks wrong, you bail out Hear me?"

“When’d you get so bossy7’

Hickey switched off his radio, switched on Tito’s, and relayed orders to the Yaquis he'd sent to keep watch on the west slope of the Lomas, in case the Army got alerted and started to move from their base on the coastal plain.

The cabbie sat munching peanuts, he and Hickey watching Leo’s Packard Phaeton creep toward the gateway to Las Lomas. A block behind came a Ford and a taxi. The Packard stopped at the gate. Suddenly all four doors Hashed open. Bodies swarmed out and seemed to devour the guards. Then two Olmecs dragged the limp guards off the road, and the other Olmecs piled back into the Phaeton as the trailing cars caught up. All three cars came speeding up the hill.

The Yaquis and Tito sprang into the Jeep beside Hickey. He pushed the starter pedal. The motor sputtered and caught. In a second they were bounding across the hill. They met the road seaside from the crest, just before the other cars got there. Hickey waved. All the cars rolled slowly, quietly down and pulled to a stop, single file on the shoulder about 300 yards up the hill and around a turn from the del Monte place.

Hickey ran to the Packard and met Leo climbing out The old man looked cooler than he’d sounded on the radio. He leaned over the door, resting his chin on the frame.

“Stay here," Hickey said, “and keep a few boys with you. If there’s trouble and you need to take the Jeep, just do it. Don't think.”

“Go on," Leo grumbled.

Hickey gave a glance around while Tito shooed the sad-faced Otomis out of the Ford. Two of them opened the trunk and took out a couple of thin cotton mattresses. Tito sent them down the road to cross on the far side below the estate and proceed in from the west. The Olmecs he sent straight across, with two mattresses, to scale the east wall. Hickey drew a long breath, then ran back to the Kickapoos, around the cab and the Studebaker. “You all get the plan? Okay. Now, shoot if you have to. Make up your own mind. Let’s go."

Hickey led the way. They ran across the road, started down toward the gate along the eight-foot-high wall topped with shards of broken glass. About 30 yards up from the gate, they walked more softly, listening, and just before the gate, they stopped — at a sign from Hickey, two Kickapoos strapped their rifles across their backs, pulled hunting knives and set them between their teeth, took leather gloves from the pockets of their jeans, and pulled them on. Hickey made another sign. Two more Kickapoos hoisted those first ones up the wall. One on each side of the gate. Light, wiry, and strong, the Kickapoos flew over the wall. They fell like ghosts beside the two blue-shirted mestizo guards at the door of the Casa.

One guard yelped, whirled, and fell with a knife in his back. The other, clobbered by a rifle bun. toppled against the wall. A Kickapoo threw open the gate. Indians with ropes and gags dragged the fallen guards into a garden of succulents.

Hickey studied the faces of his Kickapoos. They stood pressed against a wall on the west side of the front porch. Something looked wrong. No resistance. Maybe a few platoons of Germans waited inside, with machine guns aimed at the door.

He turned to the cabbie. “Whatta you think?”

Tito stood hunched with his hands on his knees like any second he'd vomit. "Why you ask me? You the general.”

At a yelp from his radio, "Here they going." Tito jerked up tall.

“Now. boss.”

Hickey slowly flicked on his radio. ‘They bit, old man.

We’re going in."

The knob turned easily, but the door must’ve weighed 500 pounds. Hickey shoved hard. It swung and banged against a wall. He stepped inside. Behind him eame Renaldo, the biggest Kickapoo, with a Browning machine gun. The rest jumped in and fanned across the entryway that led to an enormous white room. With not a soul in it

The Kickapoos started crossing the great hall. The floor was a shiny mosaic of small wooden blocks, oak. teak, mahogany in patterns of stars, pyramids, and moons. In front of the sofas and chairs upholstered in velvet and suede lay fine Persian nigs. Tapestries and paintings covered the walls — Chinese landscapes. Renaissance merchants, a gaunt horseman by El Greco. The mahogany dining table, big as a dance floor, took up only a comer. Glittering chandeliers of crystal and enough bulbs to wake a whole city hung from the ceiling two stories up. The mezzanine's railed landing stretched down the whole east side — from there the first three shots blasted.

Two bullets splintered the floor. A Kickapoo yowled. He dropped his gun, grabbed his shoulder, staggered back into a wall, and eased himself down. The other Kickapoos wheeled and fired.

A guard toppled over the rail and crashed onto the dining table. Another fell and writhed on the landing with a foot and leg sticking through the rail. But the last gunman escaped up a mezzanine hallway.

Hickey told a Kickapoo to tend the shot one. He sent two others and Tito to search the first floor east wing. He ordered Sergeant Jack. Renaldo. and four other Kickapoos up the circular stairs to the mezzanine. He and the other three Kickapoos spread out. peering behind sofas and chairs. They kicked over chairs and end tables, knocking drinks on the Persian rugs. One picked up crystal glasses and threw them at the walls. At the end of the great hall, through one door on the right, was a parlor full of stuffed velvet chairs and candlelight tinted gold from the shine off picture frames and candlesticks. Beyond the parlor, a long archway led to the gaming room, white carpet so fine and deep it looked like ermine, walls mosaicked in tile renderings of naked brown angels. There were six card tables with maroon felt, two roulette tables littered with half-full drinks and stacks of chips.

Hickey and two Kickapoos stepped through a door on the left, into the kitchen that looked like an outbuilding. It had a floor of dark, splintery pinewood. Stained walls hung with cast-iron pots, stalks of chiles. Big sinks, long cutting tables, the smells of beans and masa.

They cut through the pantry and outside, ran across the yard to where the Olmecs and Olomis held captive the ricos and whores who’d fled out the back way. A few blond men. At least two — the short, gray-faced guy. and the older one with liver spots — Hickey'd seen before when they were wearing uniforms with velvety maroon hats and gold buttons, in Hell. The old fellow had collapsed. A middle-aged, portly doll and an Indian beauty so young she might’ve been a kid playing dress-up held the old man by the arms. Hickey scanned the whole crowd, looking for Zarp. Maybe the Devil stood at an upstairs window, drawing a bead on his skull.

But the rest couldn’t scare a chipmunk, between them. They were a flock of tweety birds, now that a gang of poor Indians stood between them and their substance. Hickey turned to Crispin the Olmec. ‘Tie these clowns back to back and throw ’em in the pool.”

Two shots cracked. From inside. Hickey’s army spun and aimed at the noise. But there was nothing to see, and all you heard now was shouts and the blustering wind. Hickey and the Kickapoos ran back to the house through the kitchen into the great hall and found Tito and his men with their guns aimed at the landing. When Hickey ran up beside Tito, the cabbie whispered. “Boss, you gotta see what's out there. A garage, so big like for trains. And six limousines. We don't find no gold, it’s okay, hombre, we got six limos.”

Hickey ordered them to follow and ran to the spiral stairs.

On top, two hallways led off the landing. Two bedroom wings, each with six carved handwood doors. Hickey sent the cabbie and his band down the south wing and started with his own squad down the north wing, but as they got ready to turn the comer, his radio sounded.

‘Tom. I think we re in a mess. A cruiser's on the road. Our boys at the gate got ’em stopped, but don’t count on that for long. Find your damned gold yet?"

"Buy me ten minutes." Hickey said. “And get the cars down here into the yard."

“Right. I guess ten minutes you got. Maybe not a second more.”

Hickey dropped the radio mike. He poked his head around the comer. At the end of the hall, a guy lay sprawled on the floor, his blue shirt stained like a bloody vest.

Hickey told the Kickapoos to each search a room. He took the closest door, on the right, turned the knob, and with his bayonet out. he kicked it open. The room was tinted soft pink and green, dimly glowing from a lamp beside the canopy bed where two senoritas in tom nighties lay tied with wound-up sheets. They weren't even squirming, but their dark eyes followed Hickey like searchlights. Hickey gave them a quick bow. Then he looked in the bathroom and saw it had a door leading to the next room. He quietly turned that knob. Kicked through the door.

He almost got blasted by Sergeant Jack, who was guarding two naked women and one old man. Santiago del Monte. The Presidente, who might be as rich as Solomon, stood bowlegged in a comer, pissing down his leg. Both arms over his head, one hand flexed claw-like, he yelled a string of curses. Then he fell back into the wedge of the comer, dropping his arms and using them to brace himself there.

Jack aimed his Browning at the old fool and growled, “One more time he calls my mother a puta. boom.”

“Who fixed that guy in the hall?”

Jack told him how the guard had stepped out of the last room on this wing, the one on the left with the locked door that you couldn't kick through. Desmond had blasted him.

Hickey nodded and stepped out there. He walked to the last door on the left stood a minute beside the dead guard, as three Indians gathered around him. They all stared at the door. Hickey knew exactly what he’d find in there. He could feel its power.

He gave orders that everybody should get herded out back.

A parade of whores and ricos began. They appeared out of rooms all along that wing. Kickapoos and Yaquis shoved them down the mezzanine hall, along the balcony toward the spiral stairway. The men. especially the police chief. Buscamente. proud as ever in his silk cowboy shin and high-heeled boots, cursed and threatened everybody. Most of the whores looked amused, like they were going to a party with their long, bare legs and bright silk underwear, hips rolling and twitching. Two of them pranced along the hallway applying lipstick.

As he stood at the door of the last room on the mezzanine. Hickey’s radio clicked. ‘Tom, that car’s the goddamn federates. They’re making time up the hill.”

“Okay, get yourself outta here. This minute.”

“No. Listen to me. Tom. If you ain’t found the gold yet, once those cops get up here — they’ll pin you down till the Army shows. We all gotta run now. Bring a couple hostages. Big shots. Forget the damned gold. It ain’t there.”

“Yeah. It is,” Hickey said darkly. I’m not leaving without it. But you are. You got Vi. Magda. And Wendy.” With a cramp in his chest and his legs shuddering, Hickey switched off his radio.

The big Kickapoo Thompson gunner, Renaldo. Hickey ordered to stay by this door. He led the other two down the hall, back to the landing and along to the south wing. In the first room on the right, he found Tito chatting with a pretty mestizo who lounged on the sofa rubbing against him.

When Hickey glared, the cabbie snapped, “It’s okay, boss. We got everything fine down here. I’m asking Malu here about this gold. You want me tell you where the gold maybe is?"

"I know," Hickey said. “Now, you take some drivers and get the cars off the street, on this side of the wall. There’s federales on the way.”

The cabbie sat for a minute squeezing the girl’s knee. Then mumbling, he got up and hustled out. His boots clomping hard on the stairway echoed in the great hall. Hickey turned to the servant girl.

“El cuarto de oro, ” Hickey said. “You got a key? llave?"

“No, Senor. La unica llave es del diablo aleman. ”

“That’d be Zarp.”

“Oh, sL ”

They turned down the north wing. Two Kickapoos stood by the door at the end of the hall. They’d pushed the dead guard up against the far wall, out of the way.

Since Hickey outweighed the biggest Kickapoo by at least 50 pounds, he told them to stand back and cover him. He kicked the mahogany door, a full blast with his right sole that nearly busted the arch of his foot. The door didn't give. He told the Kickapoos to have at it. They hit the door with feet, elbows, shoulders. When they gave up, Hickey pulled his .45 and fired at the lock. Then he kicked again. Still wouldn't budge. Finally he shooed the others down the hall, unclipped a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, set the grenade on the floor in the doorway, then let go and ran for the landing.

The boom sounded far off, echoing down the hallway like out of a cavern. Then with a great thud the door fell, and three rifle shots from the room smacked into the wall across the way.

Dark, acrid smoke gushed up the hall on wind from the blown-out window. Hickey unclipped another grenade. He walked along the north wall, stepping softly, but to him it sounded loud as falling trees. Halfway, he stopped and listened. Heard nothing. Five feet from the door, he pulled the pin and lunged forward. He stumbled, almost fell over a hunk of crashed-in wall, and slung the grenade through the doorway.

As that blast hit, he slipped and skidded around the comer. The Kickapoos and Malu watched him with admiration, and he sat there a minute catching his breath, wishing his heart would ease down. The Kickapoo named Desmond reached to help him up and stood beside Renaldo waiting for orders. Three more Kickapoos ran down the landing from the south wing. He started back around the comer. But Desmond touched his shoulder. “Me, sir.”

Desmond took the lead. The room was still full of smoke like a reddish-golden fog. Walking on debris. Desmond used a sleeve to wipe his glasses, then he pushed through the fog, his head stuck forward, with Hickey just a rifle-length behind and to the left. When the shots boomed — two in a breath, and Desmond fell sideways as if he’d been cut in half. Hickey dropped behind Desmond, sighted at the blue thing moving through the smoke — he fired a whole clip, ejected, slapped in another and fired it clean.

In a fury, Hickey leaped up. jumped over Desmond's body and a pile of debris, and kicked the blue soldier who lay twisted on the plush white carpet, ribbons of blood spurting from his neck. The Indian face looked about 12 years old. Still Hickey booted, kicking hate and fear out of himself. Then he wheeled and gazed around the room, eyes pulsing with his heartbeat.

The room flashed at him like sunrise appearing out of a hazy dream. He saw a wall about 20 feet long, of shelves covered with golden vases, candlesticks, statuettes, bowls. Beneath the shelves sat three trunks twice as big as footlockers. Cherry wood with golden hasps and braces. Along the east side, about 30 feet from the blown-out door to the comer, the wall was cluttered with paintings in golden frames and two big calendars, an Aztec, and a Mayan, made of gold, and the cameo likeness of a schooner, all gold.

Then he gazed toward the comer, saw the gold-framed bed and a gun pointed at his eyes. Behind the long .38 pistol lay Senor Zarp — his giant head, with the gray beard and tiny eyes, propped on a stack of pillows, his free arm clutching a golden thing.

Suddenly, a great yell filled the room, as Renaldo sprang up from the body of his cousin, spun and ran with his arms out toward the foot of the bed, and then dove head first and sailed through the air. Zarp didn’t quite get the gun around before he fired two shots — as the Indian and then Hickey landed. Renaldo crashed Zarp’s midsection with a rifle bun. Hickey tore the pistol away and crunched the big white face. Busted a cheekbone and molars. Blood and teeth oozed out of Zarp’s mouth.

Hickey backed away from the bed, grabbed the Kickapoo’s arm, and both of them dropped onto the floor and sat breathing hard, shaking, with their eyes on all that damned gold. Soon the other Kickapoos came and stood by them, gawking.

After a minute, at the sound of a crackling radio, Hickey got up, walked out on rubbery legs, and found pretty Malu in the hall holding his radio. Then Tito and two Indians came on the run. His face crimped like someone’s swimming underwater, the cabbie shouted, “Man, we got one of those cars in, but no more. The goddamn pinche federales got us snick in here.”

Hickey grabbed and switched on the radio. “Leo? Where are you?"

Through the static. Leo’s voice rasped, “Right out front. Me and these two Indians and six federales so far. Tom, Cardenas’s boys’ll be along any minute. They're climbing the hill.”

Hickey sat on a pile of rubble, struck by a paralyzing melancholy in which nothing matteral because everything was doomed. All along he should’ve known the deal would end like this. Dreams always ended this way. At the climax. Then you wait to die. The only thing to do was go downstairs, find the liquor cabinet and die like a man, stone drunk. Only in desperation, he said, “Leo, anybody out there wanta listen to our side?”

“I’m giving it to ’em. Tom.”

“Good, and tell 'em they oughtta see all this gold.”

He walked back into the room where five Kickapoos. Tito and Malu all leered and plucked things off the shelves to look closer. The girl wore a necklace of diamonds and gold. Someone had dragged Desmond to the barest comer. Zarp lay panting through a mouth of blood and chopped, swollen tongue, as Hickey stepped over to where Tito propped a statuette in one hand while his other hand rode the servant girl’s rump.

“Where he get all this much gold?" Tito muttered.

When Hickey ordered him to move, load the gold into the limousines. Tito fiercely threw down the statue and marched out of the room. The girl stood petting the necklace, wagging her chin at Hickey, who turned to the Kickapoos and barked. “Start packing the junk down to the garage.” Slowly, entranced, they went to the shelves, heaped their arms with vases and things. Hickey sat on the bed. He stared for a while at the mashed, bloody face, the hot eyes deep in puffy sockets, and a sharp comer of the gold thing Zarp still clutched to his chest.

“So you’re the devil.” Hickey mused.

The faint voice gargled blood. “You are afraid to kill me.”

“Naw. But I’m a heck of a nice guy."

The radio sounded. Hickey jumped for it ‘Tom, the commandante wants to see this gold.”

“Send him up.”

After a minute. Leo said, “He figures you oughtta bring it down."

“Sure enough,” Hickey snarled, then considered how much gold they could dish out and still have a gang of fortunes. Even so, for a second he broiled at the idea of letting any of it go. A weird possessiveness caught him, like this gold was his right and destiny. All his life he'd passed up chances, acting like a dupe, Madeline figured, too proud to bend far enough, always trying to stride like some hero through a world that treated heroes and clowns the same. Leo called his name a few times before he said, “Okay. then. Some guys'll be coming out pretty soon. The first shot fired, or any bad news, we open up too. Tell ’em that. Tell 'em how we got air support coming.” He shut off the radio, mumbled, ’Tell ’em any damned lie you can,” and sat on rubble waiting for the Kickapoos to return from the garage. Renaldo came back first.

“You and somebody take a bunch of those candle things down front, heave them over the wall.”

As the Indians filled their arms and left, Hickey stepped to the French doors and out to the balcony. Below, a dozen rifles wheeled and leveled at him. He dove back inside and heard shouts like Crispin yelling, "Es el Heecky!”

He got up from the floor, stepped out there, and looked over the back yard. The Indians on sentry paced, their guns up and gripped tight as they looked every way at once. Any second now, Hickey thought, one of those Germans or Spaniards could yell the wrong cuss word at the wrong Indian and cue the massacre.

He walked back and sat on the bed. Sank into the downy mattress and let a hand glide across the silk sheets. He listened for gunfire. For wheels rolling up the hill. Finally, he looked at the bloody sorcerer, and after a minute the man stirred. Then he rose up just a little. Even with his face bashed in, the tiny, greenish eyes looked catlike and ferocious. A gust of wind slammed the French doors. Hickey whipped around, then turned back. “Where’d all this gold come from? Besides what del Monte stole from Agua Caliente?"

Battered as it was, Zarp's face got animated, his slack skin tightened, eyes rounded. “You are interested?” The man started coughing, choking. Each cough, blood like raindrops shot out. His voice strained weaker. “In this room are coins 400 years old and jewels that belonged to the Empress Carlotta.”

“Oh, yeah? Del Monte steal most of it?" The man coughed another mist of blood, and Hickey said wearily, “How’d you get your claws into him?”

A shot, then a volley of screams issued from the back yard. Hickey jumped to the French doors and looked out over by the pool, Indians dragged a body along. The screams kept on, louder, wilder, and another shot cracked. Hickey turned back to the room, collided with a Kickapoo—a fortune clattered to the ground. He started to yell at the Indian, but he clipped his words off and. muttering, stepped to the bed. Zarp reached out and tapped his arm with a bloody finger that left a wet stain. In a voice mostly breathe he said, “I can get you home alive, with half of the gold for your own. All you must do is bring me the gold.” As that sank in, Hickey snarled weirdly, raised his arm high, and smashed the bloody mouth with his elbow. Then he wiped his arm on the bedspread. Zarp lay still, sipping little breaths. The gold thing he'd been holding had fallen beside him. Hickey picked it up, the ornate gold frame around a painting, a miniature, an exquisite face, white and young with carved and polished features. Ringlets of real golden hair. Eyes of real gold. The same image as Zarp had worn in Hell, on his medallion. It could've been male or female. It transfixed Hickey, made him dizzy with staring. Lucifer, it was. The brightest angel.

If there was any truth to the tales of Christians and Jews, this one damned spirit inspired all the death and misery.

He tried to snap the thing with his hands. Then he slung it down onto the floor and reached for his M-1, fired on automatic, one clip then another until all that remained was the gold frame and gold chips that used to be eyes and hair. A dread silence had fallen. Even Zarp's breathing had stilled. Hickey sat on the bed waiting for judgment.

The Kickapoos ran in from the garage and out toting their armloads of gold. Hickey told one of them to guard the room. He grabbed up his rifle, his radio, walked down the hall to the landing, and turned toward the front of the house, to see if he could get a look at the street. Electric bolts zinged up his spine and down his arms to his fingertips, as if he could start a fire just by touching. In the south hallway, he entered the first bedroom on the right, stepped to the French doors. With the moon low, behind the house, it was dark enough so he opened the door a little way, crept out, and hid beneath a potted rubber tree, just as the rumbling started. In time to see the tank roll over the crest of the hill.

It stopped there, at the highest point in Tijuana. The turret swiveled. Then the gun flashed. An instant before the clap like an earthquake.

The shell cleared the front wall, the house, the rear wall, blew a crater in the field beyond.

Hickey rolled with the quaking house. After he’d gathered enough breath, he barked at the radio, “How much more gold they want?"

Leo took a minute to consult the Feds and came back. “How much is there?"

A Kickapoo ran in with news of the soldiers climbing the hill. Hickey barked. “Get everybody on the wall — Crispin tells ’em when to start shooting.” The Indians ran out. “Leo? Tell ’em this gold makes the Pope's collection look like a dime store. And I’ll dish out a fortune, soon as you get in here with the rest of us.”

His voice high, straining, Leo answered, “I better stay here awhile.”

Hickey stiffened, wondering if his partner could sell him out, if he thought all of them inside were doomed anyway. But if he couldn't trust Leo, he couldn't trust anybody, including himself. Then life was a sentence he didn't care to serve. Finally he said, ‘Tell ’em to get that tank outta sight, and they’ll see more gold.”

He switched off the radio, hung it over his shoulder, and stepped into the hall where he ran into some Otomis herding the last of the prisoners, Santiago del Monte and two of his sons. The old man lunged at Hickey with claws out and shouting gibberish.

In the gold room, the shelves and the wall sat bare and all that remained were the bed, a pole lamp, and the three trunks. Somebody had busted the locks off the trunks, and Tito stood there with his hand hitched into the back of Malu’s frock as they bent over looking into a trunk — at a lode of brooches, pendants, coins, bracelets, letter knives, daggers. When Hickey stepped near, Tito startled and wheeled around, and Hickey muttered. “You figure most of the Indians want to risk it or try to get out of here with their skins?"

As he contemplated, Tito unhanded the girl and lit a smoke. “I think they crazy, boss. Like a man. or a dog. don’t matter, he gets beat all the time but he don’t fight back until one time Ik does and then it sure don’t matter if he gets killed, not to him anymore. Maybe that’s how the Indios thinking. Maybe so, maybe no. Who knows these Indios? But for me, I think it don’t matter, boss. The army got us surrounded, we going to die. we don’t got something to lose no more."

“How many cars we got?"

With a rapturous grin, Tito declared. “Oh, man. we got two Cadillacs, five limos, a pickup truck, and that old Studebaker.”

“Fire ’em up, make sure they’re gassed and ready. Then load up all the gold. Don’t make any one of ’em too heavy." He waved at the bed where Zarp lay gulping air. ‘Take the Nazi too. Let’s bring enough big shots for one in each car, use 'em for shields.”

The cabbie clicked his heels, saluted.

“And give me a smoke.”

Tito passed over three brown cigarettes and a gold cigarette lighter, then hurried out to round up his Indians. Hickey lit up and kept flickering the lighter as he walked out, up to the landing and down the spiral stairs, across the great hall to the kitchen. There he sniffed out the liquor cupboard. Scotch. Brandy. Cognac. The best Cuban rum. He settled for a half-empty liter of cognac. As a rule, he didn't like rich guys for much. But their liquor was okay. He sipped from the bottle as he leaned against the cupboard picturing how they’d die trying to break through that army. Or, if they gave up now, they’d rot dead in a slimepit Mexican prison. There was no way out of here alive, it seemed, without giving up all the gold. And then, the Mexicans would probably slaughter them anyway. Twenty dead men. Himself deadest of all. There might not be a hell for folks who minded their own business, but wise guys like Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Hickey would sure get burned. He took another slug of cognac, and an idea struck him. A simple one he must’ve had before. He thought — you go along being a loser, but just win big one time, only once, then you’re no loser anymore. One big score can carry a guy through his lifetime. Like a big enough loss can finish you.

He couldn't see the moon, but he sensed when it fell behind the mesa.

The radio clicked. ‘Tom, I got their terms. A split of the gold, and they’re leaving it to your honor."

“Think it’s a ruse?"

‘Ten to one.”

Hickey only pondered a second. “Well, I'm sending out a car full of gold. Soon as you and your boys get over the hill, past that tank. Then they’re gonna move the tank off the road. Clear so farT’

“Yeah."

“Okay, then — we’re holding the del Montes and some other big shots. They’re going for a ride to the border. Tell the colonel we’re a bunch of crazies. Leo, and if they want to start shooting, tell ’em I don’t give a damn."

Hickey switched off the radio, strapped it to his shoulder. He lifted the cognac, stopped, looked at it a moment, then smashed it on the ground, cussed, and walked inside.

He passed through the pantry and kitchen to the garage that ran down the whole east side of the building, where Indians perched on hoods and fenders and Tito leaned against a tangerine-colored limo, flanked by his servant girl. He threw a grimace at Hickey. “What you think about this — we got two more cars than we got pinche Indios that know how to drive.”

“I’ll drive one. You drive one."

“Sure I’m going to drive. That makes one more we need.”

‘Teach somebody, quick. We got five minutes. And send up for a prisoner to drive the old Studebaker. and fill it pretty good with gold. That’s our ticket outta here. Give ’em the biggest stuff, chandeliers and all that. We’ll take what’s easiest to carry.” He nodded toward the servant girl. “She going with you?” “She’s wanting to, all right.”

“You tell her we’re probably gonna die?”

Tito rolled his eye. “You don’t have to tell a woman everything.” But Hickey glowered until finally the cabbie turned to Malu and talked in Spanish. She bowed her head a little, then raised it and grabbed a tight hold of the cabbie's arm.

Then the radio sounded. “Tom?”

“Wait a second," Hickey snapped. He called over a Kickapoo and told him to get a few guys and race around and bring the troops, and make sure all of them got out here. The Kickapoos ran off. and Hickey said to the radio, “What?”

“I’m in the Phaeton, Tom. Getting ready to take it over the hill. But damned if I could tell you what these Mex guys plan to do. They’re yelling at each other. Be easier if the saps talked English.”

“Listen, pal,” Hickey said. “If I don’t make it, do right by Wendy, will you? Instead of just figuring she’s a moron. Give her a chance.”

When he got no answer, Hickey wondered exactly what that could mean. Then he heard the Packard start before the radio fell silent.

Soon the Kickapoo ran in with the Otomis and Olmecs, and a minute later. Indians sat pointing guns out all the windows of five cars, while Hickey and his captain walked around giving the drivers instructions. Then each of them jumped into his car. The first one, Tito's limo, pulled out. Stopped in front of the gate. The others lined up behind. Hickey’s Chrysler came fourth, behind the Cadillac driven by the Kickapoo who’d just learned to drive. At the end of the line, the fifth car, was the old yellow Studebaker. a del Monte chauffeur at the wheel. It scraped along the ground from the weight of a truck and back seat full of floor lamps and parts of a golden bedframe.

A couple Otomis threw open the gate and scampered back into the tangerine limo. Hickey yelled, “Go on.” and the cabbie pulled out.

Keeping half an eye on the row of heads that poked up behind the two police cars, he swung a sharp left up the hill and eased along, riding low, an inch off the ground from the weight of his Indians and gold. Then the second car pulled out, turned left and stalled, right across the road from where the Mexican colonel and the commandante of federates crouched in hiding behind a Jeep.

All up the road to the crest, Mexican soldiers kneeled in a line about an arm's length apart with guns readied, eyes flashing. On the field behind the soldiers sat two troop-carrier trucks, another police car, and a Jeep with a bazooka mounted.

Finally the stalled Caddy lurched up the hill after Tito's limo. The third car pulled out jerkily but made the turn. Then came Hickey. And in the limo’s middle seat, old del Monte kept trying to scream through the gag Renaldo had lashed so tightly that blood ran down from the comers of his mouth.

Hickey idled through the gate, made the turn, and stopped. He leaned over two Kickapoos to the shotgun window and yelled, “Hey! Who there speaks English?"

“We hear you,” someone in hiding, a baritone, shouted.

“Okay. Gold’s in the Studebaker back there. But see. we also planted a bomb in the car. And another right next to the ladies and gents we left tied up in the Casa. See, I got a radio hooked up to the bombs, so if anybody's gonna shoot, he better plug me first, or they're gonna lose a bunch of gold and the cream of high society. Comprendes?"

When no answer came, Hickey shouted, "Adios," and pulled away.

Creeping along. Tito's limo finally neared the crest, a quarter-mile up the grade. Twice more the second car stalled. The third car bumped the second car. Mexican soldiers drew beads on the heads of Indians and Indians aimed back at them, while almost everybody cussed loudly and shouted threats and challenges.

Hickey got halfway to the crest idling the big Chrysler at five mph. From eight passengers, the only sounds were Santiago’s muted squalling. The men at the windows held tightly to their guns. Those in the middle, and Hickey, pressed forward, staring through the windshield at the M-4 Sherman tank. With its 75mm gun and the three machine guns below, it looked like a battleship.

Suddenly the big gun turreted right. Hickey stomped on the brakes. The Cadillac behind knocked them a good jolt, drove them ten feet up the hill. The tank’s tracks moved. Stopped. Inched forward.

The monster turned right — and crawled away into the field.

As the tangerine limo took off like a missile over the crest of the hill, the whole motorcade sped after it. With whoops, prayers, battle cries, blasts on the horn, they flew out of Las Lomas, swung left, and zoomed like a hot-rod funeral down Avenida Revolucidn, a straight shot of two miles to the river bridge. Some Kickapoos broke out rum. bread, oranges they'd swiped and laughed like the next stop was paradise.

But Tom Hickey just drove, smoking his last brown cigarette, looking out for an ambush while he tried to figure what had saved them. What had made the Feds and Army act reasonably? Why the Mex officers had allied with gringos and Indians.

Finally he slapped the dashboard then switched on the radio beside him. “Leopold? Say. you know what got us outta there?"

“Sure. I figure it was Cardenas. Means he’s on the level."

“You bet.”

“Some damn general he is too. Let us handle all his dirty work, break up the coup, deliver his boys a ton of gold.”

“Yep. We played to his hand, like dopes. And all we got to show for it is a million or so.”

“Damn shame. Say, how much you figure he knew about del Monte?”

“Probably a bunch,” Hickey said.

“So, why’d he let it go on so long?”

“Figured he oughtta wait till they did something besides talk and hocus-pocus. That'd be my guess. Ready to squash 'em the second they made their move. If it was like that, it was him that gave us half the gold.”

“Swell guy. Think I’ll invite him over to dinner.”

After a minute, when Hickey didn’t talk back, Leo said, “You okay, Tom? Something bothering you?”

“Yeah. The girl."

“Aw. some guys never learn.”

Fords and limos raced over the bridge, tooting horns and waving at the shantytown until naked kids and women wrapped in threadbare serapes crawled out from the jacales and from beneath derelict cars.

Hickey pulled his limo up in front of Coco's Licores. He jumped out beside a bus driver and a laborer who'd been standing there and offered them each a pistol and 20 dollars for an errand — to deliver seven prisoners to the border and tell the MP to throw these wetbacks in a cage, since Tom Hickey’d caught them trying to jump the line.

When he’d gotten all the prisoners out and marching. Hickey thought about a pint of mescal, to celebrate. Except he didn’t want to celebrate. He wanted peace.

Forty-two miles inland, a mile north of the border, Hickey’s gang rested. The oak log cabin belonged to a friend of Leo’s. Twenty men squeezed into the one room crowded with gold and smelling like an old wild dog. Leo had to drag the trunk he sat on to the window. Then, on his clipboard and paper, he scribbled the name and tribe of each Indian, before letting him grab some big stuff or a half-lunch box full of coins and jewelry out of the open trunk. Hickey sat in the dirt beneath an oak and daydreamed of Elizabeth.

The two of them stood on the patio of a swank nightclub. Havana sparkled across the bay. Inside, the orchestra struck up a tango rhythm. Elizabeth wore a gold tiara, a slinky dress, gold bracelet and rings, a gold mesh necklace. Stunning. A princess. Like Madeline used to be. Except his daughter's lips had an uppity tum. Convinced of her charm, with a steady gaze, she turned toward the ballroom as two gentlemen came strutting her way. They made Hickey want to puke.

About 50 feet away, in the back seat of the tangerine limo, Tito and Malu sat cuddling. His Yaquis sat on the hood of the limo. One of them kept looking inside over his shoulder. Finally, Tito pried himself away from Malu and jumped out, told the Yaquis to get off his car, before they scratched the paint, and make ready to leave in a minute or two. He walked around some cars, squatted next to Hickey.

“What you did with your gold. General ?"

“Didn’t get it yet. Later. ”

Tito looked the man over. “Boss, you feeling sick?"

“Naw. I feel swell."

“I don’t think so.”

“Lay off," Hickey snapped. “When I don’t eat, I get a little dizzy, maybe."

From his pocket Tito pulled a Hershey bar and a bag of peanuts. Hickey only took the peanuts. He tipped the bag and chomped a big handful while Tito donned his sunglasses, stood up, unwrapped the Hershey bar. He munched and promised that when he got to Matamoros he’d write down his address and send it to the place on el Weiss’s business card. Because Hickey better come to Matamoros pretty soon, to meet the wildest chicas in Sonora.

“Maybe when I get out of the Army," Hickey said.

“Army? Man. you know, they going to hear what we did, and they going to make you a general maybe with four stars and probably they send you for an invasion. I think Tokyo.”

“Ugh.” Hickey chuckled and yawned. “You better scram."

“Okay. I’m going now. And you better get your gold, boss, or the pinche indios will steal it all.”

He walked off, hollering to the Yaquis. In a minute the limo bounded away across the field. Hickey wadded the peanut sack, tossed it into the breeze, leaned back against the oak. and shut his eyes.

He saw Wendy, in a blue sleeveless dress, sitting in a pile of leaves beside a redwood tree where a streak of sunlight angled through the shadows. Her hands and fingers made a little dance on the side of her face.

A motor fired. Springs creaked and metal scraped the ground. A Cadillac and limo pulled away — the rest of the Yaquis heading east. Hickey slapped his head, looked around, and saw that the Olmecs and Kickapoos had already gone— maybe he’d dozed off awhile. The only Indians left were the Otomis standing near the cabin. He got up, walked past the smiling, sad-faced Otomis, and stepped inside.

The only gold left was in one trunk. Leo was on his knees sorting through it. He sifted the coins and jewelry that looked most valuable, piled that left of the trunk, and put the stuff that only looked worth its weight on the right. He looked up at Hickey. “About time you give me a hand here, loafer."

“What’re you doing?"

“Plucking out your share and getting the coins for the little fellas out there. They gotta have small bundles, since they’re riding the bus home."

“Got a smoke?"

Leo took out his Luckys, lit one, passed it to Hickey, and grumbled, “My back’s sore as hell."

“Go on, take a walk. I’ll finish up here."

After Leo trudged out, Hickey knelt in front of the trunk and looked at the treasure. He picked up a heart-shaped locket. He saw it on a gold chain against Wendy’s skin above her breasts. It looked splendid—but when he gazed up to her face, her mouth twitched and her eyes closed against the terror. Then he saw Zarp. That golden bed. The altar in Hell, as Wendy stepped to it, threw back the sleeves of the scarlet robe and lifted her arms. A golden knife fell, into George's heart.

Hickey growled, spat, shook his head, and commanded his mind not to wander so far. Then the thought of sending Elizabeth a pile of money that Castillo or Madeline couldn’t get their mitts on. Maybe having her own would tum her away from the snobs. She might delight him. do something fine like give a heap of money to somebody who needed it. But he knew her better — she was more like Madeline than anybody in the world, and Madeline would never leave the snobs She needed to feel singled out that way. like one of the chosen.

Hickey’d known plenty of rich guys but only a few he could bear. It’d take a giant, he figured, to get rich yet stay true.

For a while he stared at the treasure and thought about where it came from. Finally he grabbed a handful of coins and small jewelry, held it there over the trunk, feeling mean, low as Paul Castillo. Only worse. Not just a thief, a murderer too.

He knelt, rapping a knee on the floor, breathing smoke, haunted by at least 9 dead people. Maybe 11. He dropped the junk and stared where it fell until the cigarette burned down to his fingers. Suddenly he jumped up and booted the trunk — in three kicks the side gave in and collapsed under a pile of gold trinkets. Then he grabbed up the bust of some old dame and heaved it against the wall. Finally, seeing he couldn’t break the stuff, he turned and stomped outside.

Around back of the cabin in the oaks, he found Leo pissing. When he started to talk, nothing came out. He steadied himself against a tree and rasped, “I got what I wanted outta there. Go take some more, for what I owe you. Give the rest to these Indians."

Quickly he turned and walked away, as a high, silky voice like Madeline’s came out of nowhere„saying. ‘Tom. oh, God. you’re such a loser." His step faltered, like something was pulling him back toward the gold. It took all his will to move his legs toward the limo.

The limo would give him a thousand or two. It’d be a start. That was all he wanted. He dropped to the cushiony seat behind the wheel and watched Leo amble over.

When his partner gave him a nod of understanding, put a hand on his shoulder, told him to wise up and take his fair share. Hickey said. “Okay then, grab me something that’ll bring a few grand. But do like I say with the rest. Just get me enough so I won’t feel like a perfect chump.”

“You sure oughtta feel like that."

Hickey shouted. “Do like I say, huh.”

Leo jerked back his hand, took a step away, and stood there with his face scrunched up like a bad joke. “You're acting like a nut. Tom.”

“I got my reasons.” Hickey turned the key. Pushed the starter. Threw the limo in gear. “I’ll tell you all about ’em someday."

From the window of his cell, you could look over the warehouse across the street and see the tops of a dozen battleships with masts like oil derricks, crow’s nests on top above the highest big guns, and the stars and stripes flying everywhere around the harbor. Sometimes a B-24 taking off from Lindbergh FiekL or a seaplane lifting off from the harbor, shuddered across the sky.

Leo had brought him a new pipe, a good Kentucky briar, a pound of Walter Raleigh, a stack of books. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Undercover, a new book about Nazis on the home front; Bernal Diaz's Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.

There’d be plenty of time to read, once the guards quit pestering him. They kept nosing around, asking to hear his story. The WAC typists looked in on him, bright-eyed. All the brig personnel treated the old. busted private like a hero, on account of the rumors that with a few pachucos he’d wiped out a company of Nazi troopers on their way to a hit-and-run attack on Ream Field. Hickey didn’t straighten them out. The less the Army knew the better. So far. they’d only charged him with AWOL. It looked like he might get sprung someday. For now, he only wished the window was bigger, sunnier, that they'd let him send out for grub to the Pier Five Diner and allow him visitors, one anyway. The one who’d accompanied Leo when the old man came bearing gifts. Hickey’d heard Leo’s voice, out in the lobby, and sensed her there. He knew she was gone when an MP whistled and a different guy yapped, “What a babe!”

Copyright 1991 by Kenneth Wayne Kuhlken. From the book The Loud Adios and reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Press, Inc., New York , New York.