The Lady Dolorosa could never remember any of her lovers’ names.
“He performed all night?” Rosalita asked.
“When I woke up this morning, I needed every ounce of strength to make it to the bathroom. It was all I could do to wash up and brush my hair, which looked like a hawk’s badly ripped-up roost.”
“Your beauty inspired him to such exalted heights,” Roberta said. A shy, demure blonde in a black dress and matching heels, she wasn’t as much fun as the others but was a superlative harpist and also had a melodic voice to match.
“Stark terror inspired him to such ecstatic heights,” the Señorita said, shaking her head.
“I find that hard to believe,” Roberta said meekly, her eyes downcast. “It had to be Our Lady’s radiance.”
“Really?” Lady Dolorosa said, treating Roberta to an earsplitting thunderstorm of lurid laughter. “You should have seen the look on the idiot’s face when the High Priest ripped out the heart of my previous lover. Or when that old fraud of a witch doctor bled the guy out over the downward-sloping gutter and chopped his head off. You should have seen the new guy’s mouth gape when that moron’s head went banging down the pyramid’s steps. No, I taught him the meaning of fear.”
“But he was inspired last night, no?” Catalina asked.
“When I was done with him, his knees, elbows, even his chin and nose, looked like they’d been worked over with a wood rasp. I’ve never seen so many third-degree bed-burns on a man in my life.”
Her ladies chortled melodiously.
“Did you talk at all?” Gabriella asked. “Did he have anything interesting to say?”
Gabriella wore a toga of the sheerest yellow lace, her dark hair shoulder-length. The Señorita Dolorosa viewed her as naively romantic and kept her around primarily because she liked baiting her.
“Nada. The boy is dumb as a box of rocks. I could barely stand to listen to him. Also half the time he was too frightened to speak.”
“Still he performed heroically,” Rosalita said.
“Indeed. That is beyond cavil, and in the future, I shall subject all of my prospective lovers to the spectacle of the temple-pyramid. I shall also take them into our torture chambers and show them how my Grand Inquisitor treats those who fail me here in my boudoir.”
“It worked for you last night,” Catalina said. “The new one performed admirably. You can’t argue with success.”
“No, you can’t. Rosalita, please make a note that I am changing protocols. I will take the new ones to the Inquisitor’s chamber first. Then afterward I shall allow them to witness blood-sacrifice of my previous inamorato atop the temple.”
Rosalita quickly took a red leather notebook from her person and jotted down the instructions. “What do we call this new protocol, My Lady?”
“Motivation, Inspiration, and Instruction.”
“If only I could train my lovers so . . . effectively,” Roberta said.
“If you’re nice to me, I might let you bring one of them along for our next . . . motivational lesson,” Lady Dolorosa said with a mischievous grin.
Chapter 13
Slater and Moreno sat under the lean-to over the front of the mine. The year before Moreno had buried a cache of mining tools and fishing gear near it. This time they’d buried the money they’d stolen—almost $150,000.
Twenty miles away was a Yaqui village, where Moreno could purchase provisions with no questions asked. On the way up, they’d bought bags of beans, dried tortillas, chili peppers, and a dozen quarts of tequila. They’d used their old pesos.
The first week they spent chopping wood until they had stacks of shoring timbers and firewood near the opening to the mine. They had also killed a deer and an antelope, and one of the venison quarters was now hanging in a makeshift smokehouse. Made out of a pole tripod wrapped with deerskins, it looked like a crude tepee. The green-wood fire at its base was smoking the haunch that hung above it.
A large slab of antelope was hanging on a green-wood spit over the fire. Periodically Slater or Moreno turned it over. Off to the side, a pot of corn, beans, rabbit, wild turkey, and venison, tomatoes, and red chilis boiled, as did a fire-blackened pot filled with coffee. Mostly, however, the two men focused on the mess cups of tequila.
“Well, amigo,” Moreno asked. “Is this place not the paradise I promised?”
“The game, the fishing, the indias chiquitas if we want them,” Slater said. “It’s everything you said.”
“So why are you grim? What is so malo [so bad]?”
“That damn mine you’re so obsessed with. It’s snakebit.”
Moreno stared at Slater, silent.
“The rock is too brittle to tunnel through,” Slater explained. “Shoring timbers don’t help. Look what happened to los indios help we hired. They died under cave-ins.”
“We can always find more indios,” Moreno said. “Méjico’s got plenty of indios.”
“Not at the rate that mine is killing them.”
“Torn, we get some gold, we can take all the time in the world figurin’ what to do with that bank’s money.”
“Remember what happened when Ojo Serpiente [Snake Eye] went in two weeks ago. He died in a cave-in, buried alive.”
“One accident.”
“Then, El Mustang. The methane got him. When that damn gas isn’t poisoning us, it’s catching fire and incinerating everything in its path. How many mine fires have we had?”
“But we got a fortune in gold in that mine. I saw the main vein—oro puro [100 percent gold]—the real thing.”
“Tell that to Cuervo Rojo [Red Crow].”
“Fuck him.”
“And what happened to him?” Slater asked, grimacing.
Luis looked away, silent.
“Trapped under a ton of deadfall, a whole mountain’s worth of rock.”
Slater even shuddered at the thought.
Still Moreno leaned forward and fixed his friend with a tight stare.
“But you ain’t listenin’, amigo. I just told you I seen the vein. A drift of solid gold a foot thick and running only God knows how far and long. Enough oro to buy Sinaloa and Sonora. We could own Méjico!”
“We already got seventy-five thousand dollars apiece. We don’t need any more.”
“And if we spend one centavo of that money, we get all the armies of Méjico and Norteamérica coming down on us like rockslides. That’s Díaz’s money we stole.”
“That ain’t a mine, Moreno. It’s an open grave. You go in it, it’s your grave.”
“I’m going back in. I’m not walkin’ away from a fortune in gold.”
“Then you’re goin’ in alone. I tell you that hole is cursed, and I’m takin’ off. I’m not hangin’ around here to watch you die.”
“Then adiós—vaya con Dios, old friend.”
“Y diablo [and the devil],” Slater said.
Luis Moreno turned his back on Slater, picked up his pick, and headed into the mine.
Without looking back.
Chapter 14