Unholy Crusade Page 6

  Adam knew inside himself that his publisher was right. When he got home he sugared the pill as well as he could, but gave Mildred an expurgated version of what Mr. Winters had said. The result was a blinding row. She accused him of gross ingratitude and added, he felt without any justification, that his failure to produce really good books was due to his obsession with lust.

  They patched up their quarrel, but the rift between them widened. Mildred would let him sleep with her only when he had taken her out to dinner and deliberately filled her up with liquor until she was three parts tight. Meanwhile he set to work on another novel and refused to show her a page of it.

  The new book was a sequel to Across the Green Seas. While writing his last two novels, and particularly since the beginning of his association with Mildred, his strange dream parade of life among the Norsemen had occurred only at long intervals; but now that his mind was once more engaged on the subject they again became quite frequent and proved invaluable.

  The lofty barn-like house on the shores of East Gotland became as real to him as his Chelsea flat. It was one great room, the beams of the roof supported by two rows of tall posts. At one end there was a partition beyond which, through the dark cold winters, were housed the cattle; but only the prize beasts from which they would breed new herds. The rest were slaughtered in the autumn and salted or smoked for the months when it was difficult to procure food. Round the inner sides of the house there were stalls made from wattle. In one, with a stone surround, was the fire that was never allowed to go out. But there was no chimney to the house, only a hole in the roof; and when a high wind was blowing the smoke was beaten back, making one’s eyes smart. Another stall had a row of pegs on which to hang their furs, although during the coldest months they never took them off. There were no cupboards, but in one cubicle there was a row of shelves to hold the cooking pots with their crude designs and the drinking horns. In the place of honour, on the top shelf, stood his glass mug; a thick piece with a design of a strange animal man called a leopard miraculously depicted on one side. It was said to have come from a great city far to the southward on the inland sea, named Rome, and had cost him twenty head of cattle. Apart from his great five-foot-long, double-edged sword, which he had christened ‘the Avenger’, the mug was his most precious possession.

  So absorbed did he become by this transmission of far memory that he could think of little else; so the book progressed most satisfactorily, but a price had to be paid for that. During the past two years he had formed the practice of writing alternately a chapter of a book, then a short story or a few articles. Now he could not bring himself to break off from his novel, with the result that after three or four months his income began to fall off.

  The advance on his last book had not fully covered the furnishing of their flat. Many of the items had been obtained on hire purchase and the instalments had to be met. Mildred was still receiving her fees for reading manuscripts, but they were sufficient only to pay for her clothes and help out with the housekeeping. Neither of them had any capital or relatives who they could ask for a loan. Seeing the red light, she both badgered and pleaded with him to put the book aside and get down to more immediately remunerative work. He knew that she was right, but he was now near to hating her and her nagging brought out the obstinate streak in him. With perverse pleasure, he flatly refused.

  Then there came a bolt from the blue. Mildred, to her fury, found herself to be pregnant. Adam did his best to console and comfort her, but she laid the blame on him and lashed him with her tongue until any pleasure he might have taken at the thought of becoming a father was destroyed by the knowledge that he was now tied to Mildred more firmly than ever. On top of that he was acutely harassed by the knowledge that having to maintain a child would prove an additional drain on their already strained finances.

  His only consolation was that he had finished his book and was well on with revising it. Ten days later he was able to send it in and give his mind to devising plots for short stories. But writing the book had taken so much out of him that his imagination seemed to have dried up. He should, he knew, have had at least a fortnight’s complete change and rest, but a holiday was out of the question: they could not possibly afford it. By driving himself mercilessly he succeeded in turning out about two thousand words a day, but he knew the writing to be of indifferent quality and was further depressed, although not surprised, that half the stuff he sent in was turned down.

  The six months that followed were an ever-increasing nightmare. Mildred had a bad pregnancy and mounting fears of the ordeal she could not escape. Vindictively, she took it out of Adam, abusing him both as the cause of her sickness and about the sad falling off in the standard of his work. For as long as he could each day he now shut himself away from her, doing his writing at a small table in the bathroom, but they had to meet for meals and share their bed at night. In such an atmosphere his work deteriorated further. He found himself incapable of writing stories acceptable to good magazines and even from lesser papers the ratio of rejection slips for his articles steadily increased.

  A time came when his bank manager refused him a further overdraft; so, in desperation, he asked Mr. Winters for an advance on his unpublished book. Winters pointed out that After Dusk in Southampton had proved an even worse flop than The Sea and the Siren and that both books had outstanding balances against them; so, with the firm, Adam was already well ‘in the red’. But he admitted that his reader’s reports on the new book Chronicles of Ord were encouraging and, somewhat grudgingly, let him have two hundred pounds.

  In overdue hire-purchase instalments and other liabilities the two hundred pounds melted away overnight. For some time past Adam had been unable to take Mildred out to dinner or a movie, even once a week. They scraped and tried to save by getting rid of their cleaning woman. The additional work thrown upon Mildred made her still more shrewish; although she hardly attempted to cope with it, with the result that the flat became a pig-sty. Bills continued to roll in, but only an occasional cheque for a few guineas from an editor, and the bank manager became difficult, insisting that Adam’s overdraft must be substantially reduced.

  By early summer the position had become desperate: the grocer and Adam’s tailor were both threatening to take proceedings unless their accounts were paid; he could not even find the next quarter’s rent. Worked out, harassed almost beyond endurance, flagellated day and night by Mildred’s viperish tongue, utterly miserable, he realised that unless something absolutely unexpected happened he would be made bankrupt.

  The absolutely unexpected did happen. Mildred was knocked down by a car in the King’s Road and killed. That same afternoon, an hour before Adam learned that he was a widower, Mr. Winters telephoned. He had sold the British serial rights in Chronicle of Ord for a thousand pounds.

  After that the thing snowballed. An American publisher took the book, United States serial rights were sold for five thousand dollars. When the book was published in the autumn it went right to the top in the best-seller lists. It won Adam the Atlantic Prize and was a huge success in the United States. The film rights were sold and translation rights to half a dozen countries; editors were begging Adam to let them have at any price he liked to name the short stories they had rejected. A year after Mildred’s death a Company that Adam had formed to exploit his copyrights had bought him a Jaguar and paid for him to live in a suite at the Ritz.

  Lucky Adam Gordon. He had survived when the rest of his family had perished. Lucky Gordon, although the son of a poor Scottish net-maker, he had been sent to one of England’s finest public schools. Lucky Gordon, against all reasonable possibility at the time, he had been through a good university. Lucky Gordon, with his first book he had made a name for himself. Lucky Gordon, Fate had relieved him of a wife whom he had come to hate. Lucky Gordon, with his fourth book he had hit the high-spots and as an author was now the envy of the literary world. Lucky Gordon, that winter he was able to travel de luxe to Mexico, the warm, exotic, wonderful
land of which he had for so long had dreams and longed to see.

  But parts of his road to riches had been far harder than people knew, and several times it had seemed that his luck had deserted him for good. As he finished his daiquiri and his eyes again roved over the well-dressed men and lovely women dining in the roof restaurant of the Del Paseo, he wondered a shade uneasily for how long his present luck was going to last.

  2

  An Author in Search of a Plot

  Adam had flown out from England on New Year’s Day by the Qantas direct flight, touching down only at Bermuda and the Bahamas. Soon after one o’clock in the morning the aircraft had come in over Mexico City. Nearly six million people lived down there in the broad valley so, on any cloudless night, countless twinkling lights could be seen; but, as the Christmas decorations were still up, the great arena blazed like a velvet carpet heaped with strings, loops and plaques of precious jewels, making a never-to-be-forgotten sight.

  Next morning he had slept late; then, after a breakfast-lunch up in his eighth-floor bedroom, he got out a map and through the plate-glass that formed the wall of one side of the room, he endeavoured to imagine the city as it had been in the days of the Aztec Empire.

  That proved impossible. Then it had consisted of a large island in the middle of a great lake, to the shores of which it was connected by three long causeways. A copy of a drawing of it, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, that Adam had seen, showed the island to have been entirely built over with many fine plazas, palaces and pyramids. That was how Cortés and his men had seen it on their arrival and reception by the Emperor Moctezuma. They had marvelled at the beautifully carved stonework of the buildings, the scrupulously clean markets and the balconies of the houses gay with flowers.

  Moctezuma’s intelligence service had been good. For years past he had been receiving reports of the Spaniards’ activities in the Caribbean; of their ships as big as houses, their cannon and muskets that could deal death from a distance by fire. He had endeavoured to persuade his formidable visitors to go away by making them presents of many beautiful gifts and much gold. The Spaniards were few in numbers and after eight months, disgusted by his cowardice in submitting to their blackmail, his people had revolted, stoned him to death and driven the Spaniards out. In la noche triste, as that terrible night was called, many of them had been so loaded down with gold that while trying to escape they had fallen from the causeways into the lake and had drowned.

  But Cortés, with the survivors and a host of Indian allies hostile to the Aztecs, had returned. Their last Emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had led a most courageous resistance, but in vain. Then, in revenge for the Aztecs’ treachery, Cortés had razed the beautiful city of Tenochtitlán, as the capital was then named, to the ground. All that remained of it were many stones that the Spaniards had used when building a new and entirely different city.

  An even greater change had been caused by the complete disappearance of the island. Late in the nineteenth century the great shallow lake had been drained, with the object of growing crops there. That had not proved possible because the marshland was strongly impregnated with salt; but ever-spreading suburbs had since been built on it, so that no trace remained of what had once been a tropical Venice set in the great fertile Anáhuac valley.

  Yet, further afield, the scene was unchanged. On either side of the valley ranges of mountains, some with the sun shining on their snow-caps, dropped away into the misty distance. They were dominated by Popocatepetl, rising ten thousand feet above the city to seventeen thousand seven hundred feet.

  Aeons ago Mexico had been split by a great rift running from Vera Cruz on the Atlantic to Cape Corrientes on the Pacific. The central plateau, on which Mexico City lay, had been heaved up and on both sides of it a belt erected eight hundred miles long by one hundred wide, dotted with innumerable volcanoes, many of which were still active. Once their lower slopes had been covered with dense forests of cedar; but, for building and fuel, the Spaniards had cut them down. The great ranges had since become a region of unbelievable harshness and desolation.

  To the north of the rift lay many equally inhospitable areas of desert, and to the south of it, stretching away to Yucatán and Guatemala, vast tracts of low-lying land covered with jungle. Both could become unbearably hot and lack of roads rendered some parts so inaccessible that the Indians still lived in their villages in primitive conditions. So remote were they from law and order that if an aircraft had to make a forced landing in their neighbourhood they were still capable of murdering the passengers.

  But during the past forty years enormous changes had taken place in Mexico. The land was incredibly poor and its agricultural value had been greatly reduced during the centuries by deforestation, which lessened the rainfall. Industrial development had attracted large numbers of the poverty-stricken peasants to the cities, many of which had quadrupled in size so that they now formed an extraordinary contrast to the barren lands scattered with miserable villages that surrounded them.

  Mexico City itself was the exemple par excellence of this new age and when Adam went out that afternoon he was amazed by the grandeur of this modern metropolis.

  Past his hotel ran the Paseo de la Reforma: a mile-long, six-lane highway that had been driven right through the centre of the city, with great skyscrapers of steel and glasr rearing up on either side. Along it surged a flood of vehicles, the fast cars on its inner lanes speeding along at sixty miles an hour. In the side streets behind his hotel, where lay the best shopping district, there were jewellers, modistes, antiquiers and men’s shops that were evidence of the riches of the Mexican upper classes.

  In the evening he went out again to see the illuminations. The Reforma, and all the other principal highways, had chains of coloured lights across them at frequent intervals and, every few hundred yards, big set-pieces of Father Christmas in his sleigh, the Seven Dwarfs, groups of angels and big baskets of flowers. Skyscrapers, with every window lit, reared up towards the stars and downtown, in the old part of the city, the Plaza de la Constitution was a sight never to be forgotten. In it stood the oldest Cathedral in the New World, the National Palace and the two City Halls. Every facet of these huge buildings was lit with concealed lighting, making the square as bright as day and very beautiful. Nothing that Paris or London had ever shown could approach the magnificence of these illuminations and nothing could have more greatly impressed Adam with the wealth of modern Mexico.

  As he ate his late dinner in the roof restaurant of the Del Paseo he thumbed through a guide-book to make plans for the following day, and decided that Chapultepec Park had places in it that were the most likely to provide him with ideas for the basis of a new book.

  The one-thousand-three-hundred-acre park lies at the western end of the city and the broad boulevard of the Reforma continues on for two miles between its flower gardens, natural woodlands, lakes and recreation grounds; but next morning Adam’s taxi turned off to mount the steep wooded hill on which stands Chapultepec Castle.

  It had been built by one of the Spanish Viceroys in the eighteeneth century and now contains a museum of arms, pictures and furniture; but its main interest was that it had been the residence of the ill-fated Austrian Archduke Maximilian.

  There were still many relics of Maximilian and his beautiful Empress, Carlotta, in the rooms they had occupied. Adam found them pathetic, and their furniture hideous, but he had already ruled out the idea of using this period as the background for a book because their tragic story was so well known.

  That applied even more to Hernando Cortés; but in one of the larger halls a spacious modern mural by Diego Rivera greatly intrigued him. It portrayed all the rulers of Mexico, from the Conquest on; and, among them, Cortés was shown as a hideous, wasted, bandy-legged man with a head like a skull.

  Turning to his guide, Adam asked why the firm-faced and virile Spanish hero should have been represented as such a hideous creature.

  The fat little guide sniffed and replied, ‘To Mexicans he is
no hero. He brought to our people much suffering, and he is so portrayed here because, when he died, he was riddled with syphilis.’

  ‘That is news to me,’ Adam remarked, ‘and I have read pretty widely about him. What grounds have you for believing that he was a syphilitic?’

  The guide then told him that in 1823, when the heroes who fell in the War of Independence had been re-interred with honour in Mexico City, the priests had feared that the Indian mobs might desecrate Cortés’ grave; so they had removed his remains and secretly bricked them up in a wall of the chapel of the Hospital of Jesus, which Cortés had founded. Then in 1946 the finding of an old document had led to their discovery. Mexican anthropologists had examined the four-hundred-year-old bones and it was upon their assessment that Cortés was now said to have been a syphilitic monstrosity.

  Adam would have given long odds that this was a vindictive libel arising from the intense hatred with which the Mexicans had come to regard the Conquistadores; for he knew that even Cortés’ enemies who had known him in his lifetime had written of him as a sombrely-handsome man, with a body that was capable of almost tireless endurance. The fact was that although, of course, the popular belief that he had conquered Mexico with five hundred Spaniards and sixteen horses was a myth.

  The fact was that during his campaigns he had had many thousands of Indian allies. In 1519, when the Spaniards had landed at Vera Cruz, the Totonac caciques, who then ruled that part of Mexico, had received them with awe, then, when they had disclosed their intention of marching against the Aztec capital, willingly assisted them by supplying stores, porters and a great army of warriors.