follow what I hunt for,” he answered.
“Then you consider me an animal?”
“I’m helping out.”
“That’s not all you’re doing.” She held him inside her gaze, then walked over to the bed where she untied the flaps of a hand-stitched leather suitcase.
“Would it amuse you to know that I’m an expert at capturing wild animals?” She removed a rattle from the suitcase and shook it back and forth, her eyes rolling as she circled around him, uttering a throbbing chant that seemed to be coming from the middle of her chest.
“I don’t like being circled,” he warned. “When I’m trapped I feel—”
“I know,” she said. “You’re dangerous.”
She laughed and shook the rattle in his face, then threw it on the bed.
“If you don’t return to the lobby, Ivan will come up and shoot you. He’s famous for that.”
“I can handle Ivan,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Her question seemed to be directed as much to herself as to him.
When he couldn’t come up with an answer, he shrugged and left the room.
~ ~ ~
Count Baranofsky was waiting for him in the lobby. Taking Zebulon by the arm, he led him into the hotel’s cantina and ordered a round of whiskey at the bar. When the drinks arrived, the Count raised his glass, toasting Mexico, the United States, the brand new State of California, and finally Russia—but not the Czar, who, he proudly pointed out, had placed a price on his head. Then he asked if Zebulon was residing in Vera Cruz.
“Passing through,” Zebulon replied.
“And so are we,” the Count said. “Thank god our ship has arrived. We expected it six weeks ago.”
Zebulon reached for a plate of fried squid and cheese enchiladas. “The woman you’re with—”
“She’s my attendant,” Ivan said. “Or consort, depending on circumstance and your cultural point of view. We were traveling overland to California, but once in Denver and faced with the prospect of a harsh winter, we decided to take a stagecoach to Mexico and sail around South America to California. We were looking forward to a pause in Vera Cruz but, I admit, not one this long.”
“How’s your pause been treatin’ you?” Zebulon asked.
“Abominably. This is our third hotel. Each one more frustrating than the last. Sullen service. Worse food. Mosquitoes. Flies. Bed bugs. But despite the inconveniences, the city is not without its sultry charms; although, as we have learned only too well, it’s a city given to unexpected vapors and violence.”
The Count sighed, grateful for the opportunity of talking to a stranger that he would never see again. In pedantic detail, he described their voyage from Venice to New York, including the side streets and mercenary shops of Algiers, the restaurants of Málaga and Lisbon, and finally, the physical hardships of traveling overland to Denver—a journey that saw them nearly drowned crossing the Mississippi, attacked by Comanches, and almost killed in New Mexico in a barroom brawl.
The Count hesitated, not sure how much he should reveal. “An occasion, I might add, that you seemed willing to provoke.”
“I don’t recall what went down,” Zebulon said. “I was trapped inside a nest of snakes.”
“When you sat down at the table, obviously you were asking for trouble. Of course, I was well lubricated. And then we rode out on the stagecoach, so we never did find out what happened.”
“You call her Delilah?” Zebulon asked.
“A biblical name; her actual name is too difficult to pronounce, some sort of East African jibber jabber. I met her in Paris, where she had the misfortune to be handmaiden to a French officer. She’s part French, the rest Abyssinian, with a dollop of Babylonian and Egyptian and god knows what else. I would be lost without her. Fortunately I was able to free her owner from certain financial difficulties.”
“You mean you bought her.”
The Count laughed, delighted to be face to face with an authentic man of the West who was not afraid to say what was on his mind. “It wasn’t commerce that dictated my involvement. More an impulsive demand of the heart.”
Delilah glided toward them, waiting patiently until Zebulon pulled back her chair, a courtesy that he had never performed before, much less observed.
Without looking at the menu, the Count ordered a variety of hors d’oeuvres, followed by plates of burritos and chicken mole.
The Count’s probing questions about the rituals and hardships of life in the mountains made Zebulon realize that he was being given an opportunity to sing for his supper, if not a way out of town, and he enthusiastically launched into a description of his adventures in California—all of which he invented, not having been there. Absorbed, they listened with fascinated attention as he created and embellished his own history. In florid, often long-winded detail, he described Indian raids and encounters with grizzlies; rabid wolverines and drunken mountain rendezvous, where the lies of lunatic trappers became truth, and the truth became lies; spring celebrations of their winter hauls that often lasted for a month or more, until everyone was talked out or dead or broke.
“Well now,” he continued as they started in on plates of sugared apples wrapped in corn fritters. “Let me tell you, this coon’s tasted his share of Californie and the Far West. Yessir. Been shot on the Oregonian Trail, scalped and left for dead in the high Sierras, froze my belly in more than one tailrace ditch, trapped the Gila and the Green, near drowned on the Columbia, raised more hair’n any coon you’ll ever meet, was a barkeep in Hangtown, keel boatman on the Sacramenty, road agent, pit boss, company buster, buffalo skinner, teamster, logger, rail spiker; I done it all and then some. Been all the way to Alasky and the putrified forest, heard the opry in San Fran, scouted for renegade red niggers all the way to old Mex and on south to free Nicaragua with General Walker, parlayed my share of Chinee, Irish, and German bohunks, to name a few.”
They stared at him, stunned by this compulsive torrent of strange, exotic words, hardly any of which they understood.
“But surely,” the Count asked, “given the range of your extraordinary adventures, you must have searched for gold?”
“Gold, you say?” Zebulon wiped his face with the back of his hand and downed two quick shots, then one more. “Gold? This coon has picked more oro and Sonoma Lightning than you can shake a stick at. Made and lost more than one fortune. Even placed gold nuggets on the dead eyes of a Mex girl gut-shot in Sonora fer givin’ a poke to the wrong customer at the wrong time. Gold was my music, my fiddle and my piana, all seranadin’ the clink of pick-axes and the grind of shovels, washin’ pans, and rockers—all shakin’ for pay dirt. This coon gambled away more gold in three days than most pilgrims make in a lifetime. Yessir. I been on the Feather and South Fork and down to the Agua Fría, went bust on the Mariposa, struck pay dirt on Sullivan’s Creek, bought me a saloon and lost it the next week in Placerville, struck a fat vein north of Virginia City and was robbed down to my boots by my partner; took me a year before I nailed his scalp to the church door in Sutterville. Spent every haul faster’n I made it. Call it what you
