by Mark Wheaton
He spun the wheel and bounced into ongoing traffic. A lone truck swerved to avoid them, but Luis thought the blockaders wouldn’t shoot if they thought they might hit the driver. He was wrong, as he heard the sharp report of distant rifle fire echoing from the other side of the highway.
“Get down!” Father Arturo said, grabbing Luis’s shoulder and shoving him down so that he could barely see the road ahead. Luis expected to hear the ring of metal hitting metal as the bullets hit their mark, but the sound never came.
Luis righted himself and continued to accelerate, one eye on the rearview mirror, until they were a good five kilometers down the road. Once satisfied no one was following them, he slowed the car, though could not do the same for his rapidly beating heart.
“10K’s guys?” Luis asked.
“No telling,” Father Arturo said, shrugging. “Could’ve been anyone.”
Unimpeded and unpursued, they kept going toward Mexico City, now completely enshrouded by night, the darkness only broken by the soft glow behind the mountains in the distance. Luis was overcome as they crested the ridge-ringed basin to behold a vast, impossibly dense city stretching out as far as the eye could see. It was like being on the moon, believing all was still and silent, then looking over the edge of a crater to discover a great civilization.
It was the largest city he’d ever seen in his life, its immensity overwhelming. He could imagine living there his entire life and not seeing every corner. As they pushed closer to the city itself, trees and earth ringed the highway. In his home city, humanity had conquered nature and wrapped her in a shroud of concrete and asphalt. Here, as in Michoacán, there was compromise.
Father Arturo spotted the exit for Madero Street and nodded. “That way.”
They left one traffic jam, only to merge into another as they pushed into the heart of the city. Father Arturo nodded in a northerly direction. “Too bad you traveled all this way but can’t visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
Luis hadn’t even considered this. The story went that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant named Juan Diego, telling him in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, to build a cathedral to her on that site. He went to the Mexico City archbishop and told him what he saw but wasn’t believed. He returned and received a second vision, as well as a gift of Castilian roses, a flower native only to Spain. He gathered them in his cloak and took them to the archbishop. When he opened his cloak to present them, on the inside was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The cloak, in a gilded frame, hung in the basilica.
It is too bad, Luis silently agreed.
The seat of the archdiocese of Mexico City was located in the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María—the Metropolitan Cathedral—the largest church in Latin America. As Luis crossed República de Guatemala, he could see even from the back that it seemed to stretch on for block after block.
“We’re not in the sticks anymore,” Father Arturo explained.
Coming around the side of the building, the two priests entered through the front doors and into the cathedral itself. Luis kicked himself for believing such grandeur was only found in Europe, the towering ceilings rising high above the pews, stretching the length of a football field from a gilded altar. Even the pipes of the organ shot skyward from its position beside the quire.
A midnight Mass was being celebrated, and though hundreds were in attendance, they were dwarfed by the building, making it look like a small, intimate gathering. The priest used a microphone and amplifier to address the solemn assemblage, as if there were thousands.
“What’s crazy is that this spot was once sacred to the Aztecs,” Father Arturo said. “The Spanish built right over it. Took over a hundred years.”
“God lives where God lives,” Luis replied.
They watched for a moment longer, before Father Arturo signaled Luis that it was time to go. “This way,” he said, indicating a hallway off to the side.
The church offices of the Mexico City archdiocese were as large and expansive as that of a major university, albeit one lined with paintings, gold plates, and tapestries dating back a half millennium. Even at the late hour, priests and nuns moved from office to office, answering phones, printing up itineraries, and placing orders.
As they stepped into the building, Father Arturo revealed his plan. “There is a Father Manka here. He is an American. He visited El Tule when he first arrived and invited me to visit him at the archdiocese.”
“And you’re sure he’ll be here?” Luis asked as he opened a heavy wooden door for Father Arturo.
“I telephoned him before I left,” Father Arturo said. “I told him you were interested in seeing if there was any more information about your mother.”
This gave Luis pause. It was a passable lie, but that was why it bothered him. He hated to casually exploit his great-uncle’s memory for the commission of sin. There would be a day of reckoning for all of these things he had done.
“We need a computer with access to the internal servers, password protected or not,” Luis said. “We then hand over control to Miguel.”
“Sounds easy.”
“It is. If you’re willing to betray the church,” Luis said succinctly.
“From what you have described, it’s not the church but a handful within it that have abused the church’s power to do this. I look at it as we’re righting a wrong.”
Luis wished he was as adept at rationalization.
They approached a desk, where a young priest sat. He didn’t look much older than a teenager, and his immediately eager-to-please manner reminded Luis of the late Father Belbenoit. Father Arturo explained who they were there to see, and the young priest picked up a phone to find out where he was. As if he’d been waiting in the wings, a middle-aged priest of surprising height—easily six foot seven or eight—emerged from a nearby doorway and smiled in greeting at the two visitors.
“Welcome,” the priest said in American-accented English, shaking Luis’s hand after greeting Father Arturo. “Jim Manka, originally from the States as well. Upper Peninsula Michigan.”
“Los Angeles,” Father Chavez replied. “Born and raised.”
Father Manka led them through the doors into the archdiocese’s inner offices. The heavy Baroque décor continued, causing Luis to wonder what it must be like to work in such a place where every day you were surrounded by centuries of history. He thought it must be wonderful.
They reached a door that required Father Manka to wave a key card over a pad. It unlocked, and he ushered them in. Luis had counted half-a-dozen cameras in the hallway. There were three at this door alone. Father Manka saw where Luis was looking and sighed.
“The archdioceses, ours and others, have proven naïve when allowing outside researchers into the archives. There have been thefts of letters, documents, but plates from rare books in particular over the years, some as souvenirs, others to sell on the open market. As you might imagine, some of these works are priceless, and to razor them out of a centuries-old text is an offense so much more than a violation of trust.”
Luis nodded. He wondered how Father Manka would characterize what he and Father Arturo were there to do.
They passed through another door and into a modest-sized white room furnished with tables, chairs, and reading stands. A priest stood behind a desk typing away at a computer as Father Manka led Luis and Father Arturo to him.
“Fathers Chavez and Arturo, this is Father Cicero,” Father Manka said as the priest moved to meet them. “He will assist you with any records you need.”
Father Cicero smiled and indicated the shelves behind him. “Everything is stored back here. We ask that you wear gloves when going through it.” He pointed to a bank of computers at the end of the white room. “You can look up whatever you need there, write down the cataloging information, and bring it to me. I’ll bring it out to you as soon as I can find you.”
“Thank you so much,” Luis said.
“When I found
out who your great-uncle was, I couldn’t wait to be of any assistance,” Father Cicero said. “He was an amazing man and inspiration.”
“Thank you,” Luis said, burning with guilt.
Father Manka walked him over to the computer stations and popped the lid on a thumb pad alongside the keyboard. “Fingerprint check.”
Luis waited for Father Manka to activate it with his thumb, but the Michigan priest nodded to Father Arturo. “I can’t log in here and also be logged in at my desk. But I checked, and luckily you’re already in the system, Father Arturo.”
Father Arturo stared at the pad as if placing his finger on it would seal his fate. Then he pressed his thumb onto it anyway and the workstation came to life. On the pad itself a tiny picture of Father Arturo appeared, alongside his name and home parish.
“Piece of cake,” Father Manka said. “I’ll be right down the hall if you need anything. Please stop by on your way out to tell me how it went.”
“Will do,” said Father Arturo.
Luis sat down at the computer and took out his phone. Father Arturo pulled a chair up next to him.
“How is this computer supposed to get us to these priests’ bank accounts?” Father Arturo asked. “It looks like a simple archive catalog. It’s not even connected to the Internet, is it?”
“It’s not the computer,” Luis said. “It’s that thumb pad. Miguel told me to look out for anything that might check back with the internal servers. That’s what he needs. We’re going to use this catalog for exactly what we said.”
Luis placed his phone alongside the thumb pad. He opened a text window and wrote a single word: ahora.
Now.
Luis took a breath, unplugged the thumb pad, and inserted the cord into the phone. When there were no alarms or flashing lights, he let himself resume breathing. Almost immediately an image of Father Arturo’s thumbprint, along with his name and photo, appeared on his phone.
We’re in.
Below the thumbprint, an app opened on Luis’s phone, and text scrolled rapidly down the screen. Father Arturo looked on in amazement.
“Your friend is hacking into the servers with your phone?”
Luis sent Father Arturo a silencing gaze, then settled in to discover what he could of his great-uncle.
Gennady watched as seemingly thousands of images flashed briefly on Miguel’s computer screens, until one by one they lit up with the faces, thumbprints, names, and home parishes of six priests. To the Russian, the faces looked downright generic, an assortment of DMV snapshots rather than the portraits of men who had spent the past three decades or so orchestrating a massive Latin American money-laundering scheme.
Father Marcelo de Hoyos—Diocese of Tuxtepec, Archdiocese of Antequera, Oaxaca
Father Cornelio Colombo—Diocese of Tlaxcala, Archdiocese of Puebla de los Ángeles
Father Maximilliano Gaviria—Diocese of Ensenada, Archdiocese of Tijuana
Father Heraclio Bonilla—Diocese of Cuernavaca, Archdiocese of Mexico
Father Joao Arellano—Diocese of Veracruz, Archdiocese of Xalapa
Father Adalberto Pardo—Diocese of Nogales, Archdiocese of Hermosillo
Miguel tapped a couple of keys on his tablet and nodded to Gennady. “Here we go.”
Gennady typed, How’d you do that?
“Convinced the security system on the archive computer that Father Chavez’s phone was the thumb pad. Now, if I can keep my data miners invisible enough to pull these guys’ records, we’ll get somewhere.”
Hard to believe they need this much security, Gennady wrote.
Miguel stared at Gennady with surprise. “Hey, who has more to hide than the Catholic Church?”
There was more information on Bishop Socorro Trueba than Luis could’ve looked over in a lifetime. He finally decided on a selection of letters his great-uncle had exchanged with Pope Paul VI to begin with. Father Cicero, it turned out, had already put them aside.
“I thought this was where you might wish to begin,” Father Cicero said. “Amazing man, Pope Paul. Traveled wide, living up to his pontifical name.”
Luis nodded and took the letters back to a table near the catalog machine. He put on the white gloves Father Cicero had laid out on the desk for him and paged through them. The letters concerned Pope Paul VI’s recent visit to Bogota, Colombia. When the pope wrote back asking about Bishop Trueba’s parish, the return letter from Luis’s great-uncle was more personal. Socorro spoke of the Indian poor in the area that he hoped to minister to. The letter then took a surprising turn, calling out the church’s responsibility in the matter due to the religious colonization of the Aztecs, stripping away their religion and replacing it with Catholicism.
In our arrogance, we believed we could elevate the lives of these indigenous people simply by presenting them with evidence of God. But in doing so we were complicit in the dismantling of their great and vast civilization by the Spanish. We must make reparations for this sin in whatever way we can.
It was a radical idea, particularly for its time and even more so coming from a bishop. In California there were plenty of American Indian activists who protested against the canonization of the Franciscan Junípero Serra for his role in the genocide of Native Americans. But here in Mexico, where the adoration of the Virgen de Guadalupe had cemented the hold of Catholicism, a bishop was writing the pope to say the same thing. The response, disappointingly, came from a cardinal and not the pope. There were assurances and references to God in his wisdom.
There was no evidence that Paul VI had written back.
See where you get it? Luis imagined his mother saying.
“Father Chavez, you should look at this.”
Luis turned to Father Arturo, who watched images flying across the phone’s screen.
“There’s so much information,” Father Arturo said.
“Easier to hide things that way,” Luis said.
But then something changed. The names of other priests replaced those that had initially been on-screen. More e-mails were opened and more accounts. The amount of money shifted as well. In the earlier currency transfers, there seemed to be records in the tens of millions or more. Now they were in the tens or hundreds of thousands or even less but coming from even more accounts. Faces of dozens more priests flashed across the phone screen.
“Who are these priests?” Luis asked.
“I thought I recognized one or two—” Father Arturo said, then cut himself off.
“What’s the matter?” Luis asked. “Michael said he only got a few names on that end of priests funneling money to Sittenfeld. This might mean there were dozens if not hundreds more from all over the country.”
Father Arturo turned away sharply, as if he’d been slapped. Luis looked down to what had appeared on-screen. It was Father Arturo’s photo again, with the name of his home parish. A bank page was opened, revealing transfers in Father Arturo’s name of thousands of dollars over several years, sent from El Tule to the Mexico City archdiocese.
Luis turned to Father Arturo in surprise.
“You asked how it worked. Well, now you know.”
Miguel shook his head as the information rolled across the multiple screens.
“Wow, I thought I was good at my job,” Miguel said. “It’s nothing compared to this scheme. Have you ever seen so much money? They make us look like amateurs.”
Gennady stared at the different faces flying past and wrote. Not just the six priests?
“Nah, man, that’s what’s craziest. Father Heraclio Bonilla? Father Adalberto Pardo? I ran cross-checks. They fooled me. Those guys don’t even exist. They’ve got work records, photographs, fingerprints, bank accounts, e-mail accounts, home parishes, and everything else. But they don’t seem to have ever physically existed. Six virgin births in cyberspace, complete with endless paper trails. Must’ve been something Sittenfeld set up for them.”
And all these other priests?
“A nationwide network of bagmen. The local cartel chieftains co
me to them with money, they send it to the archdiocese. Some are involved in a single transaction, some handle many a year. Hard to say who knew what they were doing, who looked the other way, and who was truly complicit with the cartels. But at the end of the day, all that matters is that the cartel never could’ve gotten all this money into American banks without the help of the church. And that’s crazy.”
Gennady wasn’t certain “crazy” was the right word.
Unlike his younger counterpart, he didn’t feel any sort of rah-rah admiration for Sittenfeld’s scheme. Seeing all the billions flying past filled him instead with revulsion. These were men of faith, men allegedly above reproach, but because someone saw an opportunity to make money, they’d been twisted and converted. He needed air.
But as he turned to head for the stairs, Miguel’s voice held him in place. “Wait, what the hell’s this?”
Gennady looked back as one by one the screens began to freeze. Miguel stared for a second more, then went to the back of his remote server and yanked the cords. He grabbed one of his phones and typed out a text.
“Get out of there, Luis,” he whispered urgently, mashing out the note with his thumbs as quickly as possible. “Oh crap. It’s not going through.”
What’s going on? Gennady typed to Miguel.
“One of the records was a trap, a fail-safe. And I walked right into it.”
“Everybody knew,” Father Arturo said, leaning back in his chair. “It was like having two collection plates. Part of the money went to us for the parish in an account overseen by the diocese in Morelia. Another, the one that came from my son and his comrades, went to Mexico City. We never saw any of that again.”
“The school? The hospital?”
“Done directly by Victor. He hired the architect, the construction firm, and so on. That was from his guilt, not his superiors’.”
“But is a widespread practice, yes?”
“Yes,” Father Arturo said glumly.
