Days of the Dead by Barbara Hambly Page A

was going to shoot. “You have no idea how full my heart is with joy and gratitude that there is so little crime in the streets of Mexico City that you can be spared to spend all of a day riding out here and hiding in an arroyo, waiting for my father to leave the hacienda, so that you can arrest a single malefactor. . . .”
    “Do you mean the man who murdered
your brother,
Señora?” Ylario’s voice was cold. “A crime for which any
natural
woman would have long since wreaked her own vengeance . . .”
    “You obviously never met Fernando,” remarked Hannibal.
    “I sing in operas, Capitán, but I don’t live in them,” Consuela replied. “Were I a natural woman, I would have married a muleteer when I was fourteen and have had eight children by this time and do nothing with my days but make tortillas for them. Now, Señor Enero here”—she strode back, caught January by the sleeve, and dragged him over to the mantel, apparently oblivious to the amount of armament still primed and ready on all sides—“has been given a mandate from the British minister to look into this matter of my brother’s death. . . .”
    “What would it matter if we blew that whore to pieces, eh?” demanded Don Prospero suddenly, showing signs of bringing the rifle up to his shoulder again. “She is minor—petty—without power! Coatlique—bah! Let her be shattered into a thousand fragments! You’re a slut in any case,” he added, apparently addressing the image now rather than his daughter, striding over to the mantelpiece to shake his finger up at the grimacing demon face. “I never believed that story of yours about becoming pregnant from a wreath of feathers, my girl. You women always make excuses, eh? Danaë, eh, that claimed the King of the Gods made her pregnant through a shower of golden coins. . . .”
    “Don’t speak ill of golden coins,” begged Hannibal. “I know quite a number of young ladies who became pregnant after showers of golden coins, and some from silver and even copper. . . .”
    “And how would this
. . . gentleman’s . . .
enquiries,” asked Ylario, eyeing January up and down with chill disbelief, “differ from those that I have made into the matter, Señora?”
    “Heretic!” The chubby priest—black robe smutched down the belly with food-stains—ventured far enough from the safety of the doorway to shake his crucifix at Don Prospero and the idol. “Apostate!”
    “Perhaps,” replied January mildly, “because I genuinely believe Señor Sefton to be innocent?”
    “Oh, thank God,” whispered Hannibal. He wasn’t much changed from the last time January had seen him seven months ago: still too thin, his gray-flecked hair braided in an old-fashioned queue down his back, incongruous over the shoulders of the short Mexican jacket he wore. There was a little more gray in his mustache than there had been, and his eyes, dark as café noir, had lost the consumptive glitter they’d had in New Orleans. Either the disease that had crucified him for years had gone into one of its periodic abeyances, thought January, or months of absolute rest in the thin, dry air had done him some good.
    “Who do you call heretic?” roared the old
hacendado,
rounding on the priest, who popped back behind the door frame like a gopher into its hole. “How am I called heretic? Since when is it heretical to speak disrespectfully to a slut goddess who deceived her son about his paternity? Her son, now, he was a true god, a great god—”
    “Blasphemer!” squeaked the voice from behind the door. Don Prospero strode over to pound on the panels, and the vaqueros, hugely entertained, lowered their rifles and grouped around him: evidently, none of them had much use for the priest. In their corner the two gentlemen in European dress scribbled madly in their notebooks.
    “If you have been given a mandate by the minister,” said Capitán Ylario smoothly, signing to his men, “you can present your papers to me—and make