banditos with it.”
“You look concerned,” Eléna said.
“Neither of us knew we were on a bullion train, and now the train is stalled on the track. We have to be ready, is all.”
Eléna nodded.
Suddenly, shots rang out. Antonio glanced around the corner of the boxcar in time to see six of the eight men dragging the cottonwood go down. They did not look like men diving for cover. They went down like felled trees, and they were bleeding profusely.
Up ahead, the track had a slight bend. The fallen tree was far enough ahead of the locomotive that the Gatling gunner had clear aim at the bandits swarming the falling men, and it tore them to pieces. Unfortunately, the gunner’s friendly fire tore up his surviving comrades as well and now the banditos had spotted them. The bandits quickly picked off the man behind the Gatling.
Antonio was already scaling the boxcar’s end-ladder and going for the big gun. Straightening up, but keeping Rachel’s head squarely in her lap, Eléna raised the Greener to her shoulder. Sighting down the double barrels, she slipped her finger around the double triggers.
And waited for the attack to come.
PART VI
Maybe you redeemed past sins by redeeming the future . . .
—MAJOR MATEO CARDOZA
Chapter 24
The Señorita Dolorosa awakened her court ladies from their middle-of-the-night slumber. When they arrived, she sat alone on her bed—scowling.
“What is wrong, My Lady?” Catalina asked.
“Captain whatever-the-hell-his-name-is failed me tonight—failed me so miserably I had to kick him out of my bedroom.”
“That’s terrible, My Lady,” Roberta said.
“They all fail me in the end—inevitably!”
The Señorita was, of course, right. The pressure to perform sexually, the horrific fear of failure combined with heér furious rants against the male sex, with which she continually assaulted her lovers, eventually unmanned the hardiest of her paramours.
“The male of the species ought to be wiped off the face of the earth” was one of the more maniacal mantras with which she hammered her lovers, often during the act of amor. “The insuperable stupidity and maddening misogyny, which they have visited on the feminine gender time immemorial, time out of mind, are simply too much for any sane woman to bear,” she would roar into their trembling faces. “Every man jack of them should be castrated and racked, drawn, and quartered.”
Still the desire to survive and to postpone what they knew would be an inconceivably agonizing end inspired even the most frightened of them to try their best. They all wanted to please her for at least . . . a few days.
But not Captain whatever-his-name-was.
So the Señorita was now in a blind rage, delivering a demented diatribe against all men everywhere.
“Take the Spanish Inquisition and that pervert of a priest, Torquemada. His child-beating mother was Jewish, and the woman who jilted him was a Moor. So what did he do? He tortured, robbed, and killed every Jewish and Moorish woman he could get his sick, twisted, loathsome, self-abusing hands on, plundering their prodigious estates after he was done. Then he split the take with Spain’s king and the Vatican, keeping a third of the proceeds for himself and his sadistic priest buddies. Can you imagine anyone today torturing their fellow human beings so hideously? Can anyone imagine—?”
She suddenly stopped in midsentence and peered out into nothingness, slack-jawed. For a long moment she simply stared and scratched her nose, lost in thought.
“Well, er, uh, come to think of it . . . maybe I can. You see, we have our own version of the Inquisition right here in Sinaloa, and I guess I do kind of . . . run it. Except I’ve changed the focus of the old Torque-madian auto-da-fé. I send relatively few women to our Inquisitor’s chambers; mostly I send him men who fail me in the sack. If they fail in their amorous duty to me, I then give to them what Torquemada gave to those Jewish and Moorish widows and the Aztecs gave to their human sacrifices. What’s wrong with that? After all, it was mankind which created this little game. I see nothing wrong with giving the male of the species a taste of his own malicious medicine.”
“Hanging the bastardos by the thumbs is too good for them!” Roberta shouted furiously.
“Send them all to the rack!” Catalina thundered hysterically, terrified herself but also offering moral support to her frightened friend.
“Cut out all of their hearts!” Rosalita roared.
Suddenly, however, the Lady Dolorosa seemed strangely anxious. She shook her head slowly, as if there was something she wanted to explain to them.
“You have to understand, Roberta,” she finally said, “I’m not a complete bitch. I don’t just torture them in dungeons and rip their hearts out on a stone altar. I do plenty of nice things for them. Among other things, I . . . I . . . I . . .”
She seemed genuinely stymied, at a loss for words. But then she howled at her ladies at the top of her lungs:
“I fuck their brains out first!!!”
Her ladies stared at her in mute shock.
“Eh, that’s something Torquemada never did to his terror-stricken widows, right?” the Señorita said.
“Right,” Roberta whispered weakly.
“Right!” Catalina echoed meekly, frantically nodding her head.
“Still I must confess that Torquemada and I have both done some truly amazing things. We’ve hung our subjects from crosses—the four-armed crux immissa, the three-armed crux commissa, and the X-shaped Saint Andrew’s cross—frequently upside down. Then there’s the rack, the strappado, the iron maiden, the wheel, the skull crusher, thumb and toe screws, hot pincers, and tongs. I’ve had my Inquisitor use all of them on men whom, of course, I order gagged, blindfolded, and earplugged. Torquemada and I have been known to sequester our subjects in coffins for months on end, allowing them out only to excrete, hydrate, and consume food.”
The ladies-in-waiting stared at her in horrified silence, but she had her wind up and was oblivious to their trembling.
“But then I always do it for their own good,” the Señorita Dolorosa continued. “It’s ‘the path of pain.’ Did you know one of the first Inquisitors wrote that ‘pain alone leads to salvation’?”
“He called it the Via Dolorosa [the path of pain],” Roberta said, barely able to find her voice.
Their Lady gave the ladies-in-waiting a demure, almost saintly smile. “Bravo, Roberta! Bravo! You must be remunerated for your attentiveness. Virtue such as yours should not be its own reward. Also I like to think that I, the eponymous Señorita ‘Dolorosa,’ was named after that unenviable ‘Via.’”
Chapter 25
Slater
