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

chair.
    â€œWait, please. I will inquire,” he said.
    He did a crisp left-face and moved across the room and through the open door into the courtyard, turning at once to the left and vanishing.
    I waited a few moments and then rose from my chair, slowly, casually, as if I was being observed. I might have been. I looked at Wilhelm for a few moments. And I thought of Wilhelm and Wilson. Wilhelm and Wilson and Asquith and Poincaré. And Czar Nicholas. And Sultan Mehmed and Count Stürgkh. And, since I was standing where I was standing, I wouldn’t let myself forget Willie’s right-hand boy Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Leaders of the world. What a bunch. A good war correspondent’s ardent employers. And I thought they would soon figure out how to find us more work. Quite soon.
    I’d stared at the lithograph long enough. I drifted, quite nonchalantly, to the doorway leading to the courtyard. The blue and white pavement tiles were faded from decades of sun. The rosebushes were severely pruned and the stone fountain in the center was dry. There were voices from one of the doorways along the upper-floor gallery. To my left. A distant churn of guttural German sounds. Krüger and his boss. I didn’t expect anything from them. And then a door was opening on the right-hand upper gallery. I took a small step back, without losing my line of sight.
    It was the tall man from the ship in the night. I could see his face for a brief moment, which moved me instantly farther backward, totally out of sight. I really didn’t expect anyone to reveal himself here. Or speak to me. I just needed to get near all this, put details in my head that might be useful. I certainly didn’t want to be seen by the tall man. If eventually I had to follow him, I did not want to be familiar to his eye. But I now had a clear image of his face, from the flash of it before me, and that much was valuable. Deep-set eyes. I did not catch their color, from this distance, but they certainly were not dark. Probably good, standard, Aryan aristocratic blue. And yes: His left cheek had the livid curve of an old fencing scar, his Schmiss, his smite, his medal of academic honor.
    I sat down once more in my chair before the desk, and soon Captain Krüger returned. He did not sit. He stood behind the desk, his arms stiff at his sides. “I am sorry, Herr Cobb. We have nothing to say.”
    â€œI’m sorry to hear that, Kapitän Krüger,” I said.
    I rose. I added, “It was only from respect for your country’s opinions that I have sought you out.”
    â€œWe are aware of that,” Krüger said. “And we offer to you our thanks.”
    He bowed at the waist. I bowed at the waist. I repressed the impulse to ask the reporter’s classically abrupt, unexpectedly knowledgeable question, in this case something like: Oh, and one other small thing, Kapitän, what is the mission of the important German official who snuck in here in the middle of the night from the Ypiranga ? But I could think of nothing Krüger might say in flustered response worth my revealing that I knew something was going on.

13
    Almost as soon as I was on the street again, heading back toward my rooms and a siesta, which was a local custom I’d quickly taken to, I knew the story I’d file later today. West of the city, out in the Fourth District, a thick column of velvety black smoke was billowing up. I could feel the smoke in my nose, even from this distance, and in it, playing a feature duet downstage of the backup band of Vera Cruz street-carrion and sewage, were two distinct smells: crude oil and burning flesh. I’d known this moment was coming since after the first couple of days, so I’d already done the story’s back-matter reporting in preparation. Most of the locals continued to refuse to step up and claim the dead bodies of their countrymen. So the time had come for the Marines to burn the corpses. A