“Ah, putas.”
“Yes, putas.”
“You are in luck, senor,” the old Mex told Hawkins thickly. “Baconora is—how do you say?—rife with putas.” He threw his head back and laughed, showing a gold front tooth. “You need not walk too far. They will find you.”
Tom again leaned forward to speak confidentially with the old Mexican. “Now would there be Norteamericano putas here, as well as Mejican? We’ve been away from home a long time, and my foreman’s a little homesick. He has nothing against the lovely Mejican putas, for sure, but tonight he would like to lie with a Norteamericano.”
“Ah, Norteamericano,” the old Mexican said, lifting his glass of clear liquid and stroking his imaginary long hair. “Sí. Our Lady of Sorrows.”
Frowning, Navarro glanced at Hawkins, then turned again to the old Mex. “Pardon?”
“Try Our Lady of Sorrows. The catédral.” He crossed himself soberly, shaking his head, then lifted his jug. “A drink for the road, senors? It has been a quiet evening on this side of town, and I have nearly finished my periodico.”
Navarro wanted that drink about as badly as he wanted his fingernails torn off in the slow Apache style, and he could tell that Hawkins felt the same. They needed to get after the girls. But both men, not wanting to look too eager, sat down in overstuffed chairs by the chaparral fire on the other side of the lobby, and had their drink. The Mexican railed in his slow Spanish-spattered English about how the town had changed for the worse since the gold mine came to town, with a dandified Englishman named Blane Ettinger at the helm.
Navarro wanted to know more about this Ettinger but the man clammed up when Tom started to probe, a fearful light entering his rheumy eyes. When he and Mordecai had finished their drinks, they said that, like them, the night wasn’t getting any younger. They shook the old Mexican’s hand and strode out the heavy double doors into the torch-lit side street.
“What in the hell are we looking for?” Hawkins asked as they turned before the Palacio Federal and entered the boisterous main drag.
“Some place they call the cathedral, I reckon. More of this Ettinger’s influence, no doubt. Leave it to a Protestant-raised Brit to open a saloon in Mexico called Our Lady of Sorrows.”
Keeping to the south side of the street, they threaded their way through clumps of loud, drunk miners of both American and Mexican persuasion, heading eastward, peering into every saloon and cantina they passed. The music had gotten more raucous since they’d entered the town, as if the mariachis were openly competing with the American piano bangers and fiddle players one or two doors down or directly across the street.
All seemed to be competing with the occasional bursts of celebratory gunfire and the ubiquitous thunder of the stamping mill.
Navarro and Hawkins were waylaid twice by fist-fights, which were quickly broken up by big men armed with double-barreled shotguns and wearing the badges of mine company constables on their jacket lapels.
When they were returning westward along the other side of the street, Navarro stopped suddenly when someone shouted above the crowd’s din, “Edgar, you old dog! I woulda bet my right oyster you couldn’t fill a straight from that hand! Ha!”
Navarro grabbed Hawkins’s arm, canting his head to indicate the saloon they were standing in front of. Hawkins nodded and followed Navarro through the crowd bunched along the boardwalk, and through the batwings. They stood among the sitting and standing miners, Navarro sweeping the crowd with his gaze.
“The more liquor you force down his throat,” the same voice rose again, “the better he gets. I just don’t understand it!”
Navarro settled his gaze on the yeller—a slender unshaven lad sitting at a table with seven others. Playing cards, shot glasses, and beer mugs were strewn before them. To the young man’s right, and scooping up a pot of greenbacks and silver coins, with a round-faced Mexican girl perched on his knee, sat a man with a battered derby pulled down over blond curly hair. He had dark-ringed, crazy-looking eyes, and two gold rings looped through his ears.
“Son of a bitch.”
“What’s that, Tom?”
Navarro turned. Hawkins was looking at him curiously. Tom hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Turning, he bulled through the batwings and pushed through the crowd. When they were alone he said to Hawkins, who was shuffling along behind him, half running to keep up, “Did you notice the pilgrim with the two gold earrings?”
“How could I help it?”
“That’s Bontemps.”
“You don’t say!” Hawkins wheeled, one hand going for the .36 Navy Colt conversion on his hip. “Well, I reckon we can find out right quick where he’s stashed them girls!”
Tom grabbed the man’s arm. “Don’t be a fool. You seen all the men surrounding him? I’d bet my front teeth they’re all part of his bunch. One I recognized as Sam ‘The Dog’ Calvino, a Confederate guerrilla like Bontemps, who rode with Sibley’s West Texas Raiders. To a man, they’re shooters with a capital ‘S’.”
“What do you propose we do?”
Navarro was walking forward along the boardwalk, Hawkins again half running to keep up. When an isolated drunk approached, staggering, Tom tapped the man’s shoulder and asked where a place called the Cathedral or Our Lady of Sorrows might be.
“Well, shit, amigo,” said the sour-smelling Irish-man, “where it’s always been. Right there at the other end o’ the square. Say, you couldn’t help a mick out with a drink, could ye? Snodgrass and Thorndike just cleaned me out over at said house of worship—though it ain’t like any churches we have back home in sweet County Cork!” The man winked and held out a big pale paw, palm up.
When Tom had given the man some silver, he and Hawkins stood staring across the square. Fifty yards up the street, beyond a large dry fountain, was a giant adobe cathedral behind a low wall. It was a cathedral like any other the Jesuits and Franciscans had long ago erected in every little town within a year’s ride of Mexico City, north and south of the Rio Grande.
Hawkins said, “He can’t mean the real Lady of Sorrows, can he?”
Tom stared at the big structure, with its wooden cross stabbing starward from the square bell tower high above the big double doors.
“Why can’t he?”
As Navarro and Hawkins approached the building, they saw the saddled horses standing before the three hitchracks fronting the seven-foot-high wall.
“Whoa, boys,” said one of the two guards smoking before the open wrought-iron gate. “No guns inside. House rules. You wanna go in, you leave the hardware in the box here. Pick ’em up on your way out.”
When Tom and Mordecai had set their pistol belts in the apple crate, atop a dozen others, the two guards, armed with shotguns and bung starters and with cartridge belts crossed on their chests, frisked them thoroughly before letting them head across the tiled courtyard to the four stone steps rising to the pair of open front doors. Fluttering torches flanked both doors, as though marking the entrance to purgatory.
If he hadn’t been looking so hard for Karla, Navarro would have chuckled when he saw what the church had become. As it was, he swung his gaze left and right across the great hall before him, at the swarthy smoky-eyed Mexican miners sitting on the couches and fancy chairs and at tables with light-haired, light-eyed girls on their laps, their hands on the girls. He felt a big gray cat swish its tail down deep in his belly. That cat got up, stretched, and swished its tail again when Tom spotted Karla.