"Joe Haldeman - Manifest Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

but that's not what I really mean. I mean that if he wanted you to do something and you
didn't want to do it, you had best put your fingers in your ears and start walking away. That
son of a gun could sell water to a drowning man.
He started out asking me questions about myself, and eventually we got to talking about
politics. Turns out we both felt about the same way towards the U.S. government, which is
to say the hell with it. Harris wasn't even really a citizen, and I myself didn't exist. For good
reasons there was a death certificate on me in St. Louis, and I had a couple of different sets
of papers a fellow on Bourbon Street printed up for me.
Harris had noticed that I spoke some Spanish—Mrs. Carranza was Mexican and so were
most of her kates—and he got around to asking whether I'd like to take a little trip to
Mexico. I told him that sounded like a really bad idea.
This was late 1844, and that damned Polk had just been elected promising to annex
Texas. The Mexicans had been skirmishing with Texas for years, and they said it would be
war if they got statehood. The man in charge was that one-legged crazy greaser Santa Anna,
who'd been such a gentleman at the Alamo some years before. I didn't fancy being a gringo
stuck in that country when the shooting started.
Well, Harris said I hadn't thought it through. It was true there was going to be a war, he
said, but the trick was to get in there early enough to profit from it. He asked whether I'd be
interested in getting ten percent of ten thousand dollars. I told him I could feel my courage
returning.
Turns out Harris had joined the army a couple of years before and got himself into the
quartermaster business, the ones who shuffle supplies back and forth. He had managed to
slide five hundred rifles and a big batch of ammunition into a warehouse in New Orleans.
The army thought they were stored in Kentucky and the man who rented out the warehouse
thought they were farming tools. Harris got himself discharged from the army and
eventually got in touch with one General Parrodi, in Tampico. Parrodi agreed to buy the
weapons and pay for them in gold.
The catch was that Parrodi also wanted the services of three Americans, not to fight but to
serve as "interpreters"—that is to say, spies—for as long as the war lasted. We would be
given Mexican citizenship if we wanted it, and a land grant, but for our own protection we'd
be treated as prisoners while the war was going on. (Part of the deal was that we would
eavesdrop on other prisoners.) Harris showed me a contract that spelled all of this out, but I
couldn't read Spanish back then. Anyhow I was no more inclined to trust Mexicans in such
matters than I was Americans, but as I say Harris could sell booze to a Baptist.
The third American was none other than the old buck who was driving, a runaway slave
from Florida name of Washington. He had grown up with Spanish masters, and not as a
field hand but as some kind of a butler. He had more learning than I did and could speak
Spanish like a grandee. In Mexico, of course, there wasn't any slavery, and he reckoned a
nigger with gold and land was just as good as anybody else with gold and land.
Looking back I can see why Washington was willing to take the risk, but I was a damned
fool to do it. I was no rough neck but I'd seen some violence in my seventeen years; that
citizen we'd dumped in the bayou wasn't the first man I had to kill. You'd think I'd know
better than to put myself in the middle of a war. Guess I was too young to take dying
seriously—and a thousand dollars was real money back then.
We went back into town and Harris took me to the warehouse. What he had was fifty
long blue boxes stenciled with the name of a hardware outfit, and each one had ten Hall
rifles, brand new in a mixture of grease and sawdust.
(This is why the Mexicans were right enthusiastic. The Hall was a flintlock, at least these
were, but it was also a breech-loader. The old muzzle-loaders that most soldiers used,
Mexican and American, took thirteen separate steps to reload. Miss one step and it can take