The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

left in the boat and he was returning to the ship.
    These two headed this way, and I eased deeper into the shadows. I tracked their approach up the pier, and as they drew nearer, I could see that the shorter, stouter one was dressed in a pea coat and watch cap. He was probably part of the ship’s crew, and he was hanging back half a step from the other man, in obvious deference. The bag the crewman was carrying no doubt belonged to the important man, who was quite tall and angular and whose suit should not have seemed so odd. He was a German of importance coming to tropical Mexico in a tailored white linen suit and a Panama hat. A German of arrogant importance, given his carriage, and given his white suit when he obviously intended to arrive without being observed. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a monocle and a fencing scar on his cheek. In my 6-power binoculars, the two men were getting close and I suddenly had a little twist of panic. They were heading into the city and they might have been thinking to cut straight between these two storehouses.
    I rose, repressing the impulse to leap and bolt. They were close enough now that quick movement might have been seen, even in the shadows. I backed up as slowly as I could make myself to begin with, and I increased the speed as I got deeper into the shadow. Now I was matching their speed and they were passing between a couple of processing sheds that flanked the back end of the pier, and when they came into the shadows of the storehouses themselves, which they would in just a matter of moments, and when their eyes adjusted to the shadows, they might see me. I looked over my shoulder and I had only a few paces to go, but smooth movement was even more important now and I looked at them again and they were veering off south.
    Now it was a matter of my sprinting toward the south side of the customs building before the two men from the Ypiranga emerged from the far side of the storehouses. I took off. I made it to the Custom House and around to the southern edge facing the city, and I took up a spot behind the man-high plinth at the base of one of the front decorative columns. I had a good, mostly hidden view down Avenida Zaragoza, which they would have to cross.
    And soon they emerged, less than a hundred yards from me. I picked them up in my binoculars. They didn’t cross Zaragoza; instead they turned south on it. I came out of the shadows and followed well back. When they stopped up ahead, at the corner of Esteban Morales, I stopped too, and I was worried about them seeing me standing here, fifty yards back and all alone in the street, but they seemed sublimely, obliviously confident in their secretiveness. The talk was apparently about directions, because they pointed up Esteban Morales and conferred and pointed on down Zaragoza and talked some more, and then finally they headed up Esteban . As soon as they did, I figured I knew where they were heading.
    This was confirmed a few blocks up when they vanished south on Cinco de Mayo . I came up quickly to that corner and I took the last step carefully to pause and watch. As I expected, halfway up the block the two men stopped in front of a wide, two-story brick-and-adobe house of the sort that had a deep back gallery of rooms around a courtyard. I’d noted the place on my basic lay-of-the-town reconnoiter on my second day. This was the German Consulate. The small man knocked, and when the door opened, he handed the bag inside and the tall man did a simple aristocratic bow of thanks—no handshake—and he went in and the door shut in the small man’s face. Before he could even turn to head back to his ship, I was hustling down the street to get out of sight.
    The tall man was clearly someone very important. Straight from the Fatherland and keeping a low profile. I could smell a story here as sure as I could smell the old-fish-and-salt-wind smell of the