Free Cape Hell by Loren D. Estleman

vessel’s course. I can but assume that God intended for me to keep up appearances in this barbaric country. My credentials, you see, are not honored north of the border.”
    He’d managed to satisfy my curiosity in less than a hundred words. If he could settle all my questions in such short order, the American Bar Association had missed its bet in denying him permission to practice law.
    He circled the room, turning up other lamps until the walls were visible, wainscoted halfway to the ceiling, with more pictures leaning out from the walls, suspended by wires to a rail. They were the usual three-quarter portraits of men in fierce whiskers and black broadcloth, one-eared representatives of eastern schools and northern authority, glowering down on the usual office furniture of oak and maple and overstuffed leather. A plate of beans and a half-eaten tortilla occupied the copper-cornered blotter on the desk.
    Bonaparte caught the direction of my gaze. “Have you dined?”
    It struck me just then that I hadn’t. I was hungry enough to sample the local fare, but wasn’t sure how well it would sit on a reservoir of beer and Scotch. I said I was fine.
    â€œYou will pardon me, then. I received a packet of material by the morning train, and at such times I frequently work straight through breakfast and dinner. I am anemic, you see. The head, it spins.” He gestured toward one of his temples, sat behind the desk, tucked a napkin the size of a tablecloth under his excellent collar, and began scooping beans into his mouth with the skill of someone born to the process without utensils. “I must ask your pardon as well for the lateness of the hour. That same work prevented me from issuing the invitation sooner.”
    I sat in a tufted love seat facing him. “I don’t work by the clock myself. I can’t imagine what business you and I have to discuss. I haven’t come all this way to enter into any legal agreement.”
    â€œYour business is decidedly not legal.” He chewed, swallowed, touched a corner of the napkin to each lip-corner, and chased the mouthful with water from a glass goblet. “Everyone in Alamos knows you have come to kill General Childress. It is my responsibility to turn you from this path.”

 
    ELEVEN
    â€œ Do not insult us both by denying the fact,” Bonaparte said; although if he was any kind of lawyer he wouldn’t know by my reaction that I had any such intention. I’d spent too much time in Judge Blackthorne’s courtroom, being turned on the spit by defense attorneys, to change expressions. “A stranger cannot cross the border unnoticed, dragging his mission behind him as clearly as smoke from the stack of your splendid train. I myself have lived here nearly twenty years, and when someday I am found extinct at this desk, the publisher of the village newspaper, who is my oldest friend, will write a stellar account of my life, adding that this late arrival will be missed in this village.”
    I watched him scoop the last of the beans into his mouth, repeating the ritual with his napkin and glass of water. Joseph, I thought. The messenger who had brought Bonaparte’s invitation was a phantom; the fireman had lost no time reporting to Childress’ representative, and been asked—politely, of course—to wait while the lawyer drafted his note. Even George Pullman’s superior standards couldn’t construct a private parlor coach with walls so thick they’d foil a determined eavesdropper. Had he tried, no less than three locomotives would be needed to pull it.
    â€œYou’ve heard the rumors,” I said.
    â€œGeneral Childress would not be the extraordinary man he is if legends did not grow up round him like desert flowers after a spring rain. As with all great men, it is necessary to discount a third of them as invention, another third as either exaggeration or monstrous distortion, and to assign