City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  El Feo makes a sound like Noah’s flood trying to move through a single, shitty downpipe. Santiago lets him go. ‘No one knew!’ El Feo wheezes. ‘It was a surprise.’

  There is no such thing as a surprise in Ciudad Real. Not unless it comes from Tijuana. Oviedo’s dog barks outside, as though to underline the point. Oviedo is his new bodyguard – smart enough to be ambitious but not show it. And compared to El Feo, Einstein brilliant. Maybe it’s time to give Oviedo his chance.

  El Santo walks over to his Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, lifts the door and gets in. He likes the smell of the leather; the contained world view inside the car when he closes the gull wings, masking all the problems, all the chingadera y media he has to face every fucking day. He likes the privacy he feels when he’s talking on the phone. He even likes watching TV through the windshield. It reminds him of the drive-ins when he was a kid. It isn’t just about showing off his taste. It is also a statement about his priorities. Speed. Class. Mechanical perfection. Gleam.

  Besides, it doesn’t take up that much more space than a grand piano.

  They had to take the wall out to get the car inside. When they were rebuilding it, they found the bug. It must have been placed inside the wall when he had the hacienda renovated. It was a blessing that they found it, and it was only thanks to the Merc. Of course he made them put it back. They could listen all they want – as long as he knew when they could hear him. And when they couldn’t.

  El Feo gets in on the passenger side, pulls down the door, the barking vanishing as if by magic. Sure he’s called El Feo because he’s ugly, but he could also be called El Estúpido or El Idiota or El Pinche Pendejo. They’re turning his turf into Beirut and El Santo has to hear the news on the radio? ‘Find out all you can about this union guy. Find out who sent him here. Find out who wants him dead.’

  ‘I’ll pick him up myself.’

  That’s the way you normally find out. You pick someone up, and pretty soon they’re telling you everything you need to know. ‘Leave him alone for the time being. Find out the other way.’

  The other way means picking someone up in Tijuana. That means one of his sicarios will have to show his face there. Risky, considering they’re at war. Not only are they killing each other, they’re killing each other’s families. It’s more than messy. It is fratricide of biblical proportions. It’s coCaine and Abel. And it is everyone’s fault. They have let it become personal, when it should always be kept professional.

  Things degenerated badly over ten years before, when the Tijuana chief kidnapped a rival’s family. They forced the wife to withdraw millions of dollars of her husband’s ill-earned dinero before cutting off her head and mailing it back to hubby. It was so fucking out there, they even put it in a movie. Kevin Spacey wasn’t playing a narco but he was certainly playing someone who was totalmente loco. But what they did next shocked everyone. They tossed both motherless kids off a waterfall in Venezuela. That one came from a film: The Mission. And it Pandora-boxed the whole fucking country.

  You can’t unsmoke a cigarette.

  Once shit like that happens, the demons come out and there’s no going back. It’s not just take-no-prisoners time, it’s take your time taking no prisoners. Ghastly murders were devised by men with a natural inclination for cruelty. Once it was bang bang, you’re dead. Now executions were taking longer than a first-class letter from Mexico City. Only a genius like Amado was able to get things halfway back to normal again, and that was by focusing on business, not butchery. When revenue is up, revenge is down. They were operating 727s for Christ’s sake. That’s why Amado was called El Señor de los Cielos. The Lord of the Skies. Amado had owned over twenty Boeings, not to mention dozens of smaller planes. At first they stole them, then they just paid cash. Not having a plane ready for a flight cost more than buying one outright.

  The money came in at an indecent rate. One billion became ten billion. They were on their way to the Forbes List. Donald Trump rich? Why not Warren Buffett rich?

  The world had seen nothing like it since the Old Days of Cortés and Pizarro. The two biggest balls in a one-handed catch: Power and Riches. In a snap of the fingers, one empire collapses and another rises. The Colombian cartels losing the power of the powder; the Mexicans taking it all over. First border crossings, then general transportation from Colombia, then money laundering, then distribution inside the United States, then actual field production.

  In less than two decades, they had gone from Middleman to Monopoly. Amado started using the casas de cambio to funnel money in and out. It was a beautiful operation.

  Then Amado died, supposedly during plastic surgery. The body mysteriously nabbed and cremated before DNA tests could be carried out. The whole story was so ridiculous, and yet it had been quickly rubber-stamped. The alternative is too awful. That Amado is still out there with his billions, laughing his ass off in Rio or Marbella, while all the other narcos are stuck in the trenches, nursing colossal egos and even bigger headaches, paying millions in bribes while dodging pot shots.

  And maybe now car bombs. The homicide rate like the Nasdaq Index: through the roof. The Lord of the Skies? With all the death he unleashed by selfishly disappearing, it should have been the Lord of the Flies. And Amado somewhere safe, laughing like fucking Nero while the whole country goes up in flames. It figures. Amado always loved playing Last Man Standing, and he even got his own El Santo moment; only when he removed his mask to announce his retirement, there was no face underneath.

  And now the Ciudad Real cartel is at war with the Tijuana cartel – again. The bomb must have come from out of there. ‘Send someone to Tijuana.’

  ‘Who?’

  Someone you won’t miss if they get killed. ‘Why don’t you go?’

  ‘I’ll send my brother,’ El Feo says quickly. ‘Curro’s reliable.’ And expendable, apparently. El Feo looks at his watch. ‘I’m late for church.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, with all the time you spend there, it’s a wonder you can do any work.’

  El Feo stares at him with a hurt expression as he gets out of the car. ‘That’s not the way you used to think.’

  He’s right. El Santo used to be a believer too. All that Santa Muerte bullshit. But after everything that he’s witnessed, he’s come to his own conclusions. There’s no such thing as God. And that’s certainly good news because it means there’s no such thing as the devil. He lowers the back of his car seat and closes his eyes. But, for the time being at least, locked inside his own huge, silver mask, there’s still such a thing as Peace and fucking Quiet.

  15

  Padre Márcio

  Padre Márcio carefully removes his fingerless lace gloves, so as not to break any scabs, and drops them in a bowl of cold water and table salt. After a few seconds he sees the first swirls of blood lifting from the gloves. He goes over to the basin and begins to wash his hands, rubbing his thumbs gently over the openings in his palms. He dabs at the wounds with a mild solution of water and hydrogen peroxide and then again, this time using Lugol’s solution, toweling the wounds dry before covering them with light bandages.

  Infection had always been a problem when he was a child. One morning he woke up and felt something ticking inside his hand, as though it were a bomb about to detonate. The wound in his left hand was throbbing. The lesion in his right hand was squirming; the skin undulating around his palm. He didn’t know what it was; only that there was something alive in there. In a state of panic, he was driven to the bishop’s personal physician, who lifted the folds of both wounds and discovered they were pulsing with maggots. The doctor told him he was lucky – the maggots had been eating away at nasty infections that otherwise might have gone unnoticed until it was too late. It could have developed into septicemia, or even gangrene. He could have lost both hands.

  He would have been happy for the doctor to have taken an ax and amputated his hands – anything to end the direct physical connection between him and the maggots, to free him from the notion of worms feasting on his
flesh, unaware that only part of his body was dead.

  The doctor gave him a sedative, and then a local anesthetic, and cleared the larvae from his hands one creature at a time. After he fell asleep, the bishop performed a blessing on the infected wounds. He knew what the boy and the doctor could not: that the maggots had been sent by Satan to attack the holy wounds; to deliberately defile a miracle.

  The boy recovered quickly, but that moment of awakening to a palpitating, living presence in his hands had filled him with horror. With self-loathing. The presence of something noxious and evil shifting inside him as it consumed his flesh was too close to memories he had hoped he would forget.

  His stigmata had begun a year and a half after the first rape. The Little Brothers of Perpetual Succour was an order of teaching brothers made up of two kinds of vocational respondents. The first were men who had themselves been sexually abused as children. The second were naturally cruel men who had an intuitive grasp of where best to find their victims. They might have sold quack dietary supplements, or worked as pimps or stand-over men. They could have become neglectful nurses in old-age homes, stealing wedding rings from dying patients; or debt collectors, or gun runners. But instead they became brothers of a religious order devoted to caring for and educating orphans, where their victims were ideal.

  Small and alone.

  When he arrived at the orphanage in Ciudad Real at the age of five, Padre Márcio was still known as Vicente Salinas. His mother was a devout and naïve young woman taken advantage of by her local priest, who first noticed her when she arrived with the resurrection flowers one Easter Sunday morning. He was forty-seven and had grown bored with his housekeeper: both in the kitchen and in bed.

  Vicente was a breech birth and nearly killed his mother. Father Felipe Hurtado waited many months, using Guadalupe in other ways. Ways she did not like, but accepted because her blessed father told her to obey, and because it was her duty. Finally, Father Felipe believed she had healed enough to be able to receive his normal ministrations. Neither the child nor the mother survived the second breech birth.

  Father Felipe sent his bastard son to the Little Brothers of Perpetual Succour in the confidence that he would receive a good education and not be mistreated the way most of the children were. But he had miscalculated, as the vice-rector of the orphanage was the brother of Father Felipe’s former housekeeper. Revenge was exacted the way it always is – on the defenseless; and after a week of hidings with belts, wooden paddles, bamboo canes and even books, the sexual abuse of Vicente began.

  After eighteen months of repeated violations and beatings, Vicente was ready to kill himself. He had no fear of the consequences of suicide that the Little Brothers had taught him, for as far as he was concerned, nothing could be worse than the hell he and the other children woke to every morning.

  Vicente remembered seeing the body of a young girl who had taken her own life by climbing over the top-floor bannister and jumping down into the stairwell. He had heard a rocking noise, like children playing in branches, and then glimpsed her body as it swept past the second-floor landing, clattering like a rain of shoes on the stone at the bottom of the stairs.

  He had raced down with the other children, undaunted by the wet red stain flowering dramatically from her hair, or the unnatural splay of her arms and legs, her corpse forming a broken star. As the others turned their heads, he had stared hard at the soft repose of her face, finding an expression of calm contemplation there, as though she had just woken from a pleasant dream and, rather than opening her eyes, had decided to luxuriate a few more moments in the comfort of its memories.

  At that very instant, surrounded by the rising hysteria of the rest of the children, Vicente felt different. He wasn’t afraid of what he saw. He knew he wanted the same thing – bloody release from this life.

  The more he dwelt upon it, the more Vicente yearned to join the girl, to share her lovely fate, better than peace or freedom. Oblivion.

  But he knew he couldn’t literally follow her into the void: he suffered from too acute a case of vertigo. He could barely approach the bannister, let alone look over it into the killing chasm below. Vicente may have feared heights, he may have feared life, but he did not fear losing blood; he did not fear the death that it would bring. He remembered the crown of red the girl had worn; like the aura of a saint. He looked for a weapon, and found one at last in a sharpened pencil.

  After dinner, after mass and prayers and lights out; after that evening’s rape, he picked up the pencil from its hiding place under the bed and began to work its tip into the palm of his hand, flinching at first from the pain, but then somehow moving beyond it, as though the knowledge that he would soon escape into the lonely eternity of death was acting as an anesthetic, slowly dulling his agony. He kept working the tip of the pencil into one palm, then the other, drilling away backwards and forwards, the soft warm bubble of his blood running cold and clammy down his wrists as he fell into a drowsy, unquiet sleep.

  He awoke to outrage, the vice-rector throwing his sheet off violently and yanking him out of the bed by the wrists. The vice-rector slapped him across the face then ran him across the room and into the wall, the crack against his skull almost knocking him out. Vicente fell backwards, onto the floor, and that’s when he saw them: two bloody hand prints like artwork on the whitewash; his mark – the proof that he was still alive. This was never supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to wake up. He had assumed that he would simply bleed to death; that his blood would pump fast and free out of his self-inflicted wounds the way it had from the girl’s fractured skull. But now instead of dying quietly in his sleep, he was going to be killed by slow degrees. The vice-rector dragged Vicente out into the courtyard and tied him to the punishment post, his hands burning with a deep, localized pain; an acute, humiliating pain: the pain of failure.

  And at that very moment of ultimate despair, when all hope has vanished and one is finally reconciled to the brutal reality of life – that every moment is suffering or an unsuccessful attempt to alleviate suffering – as in every fairy tale, at that exact moment, a savior made a spectacular entrance.

  The bishop of Ciudad Real.

  His Grace was so astonished to see a boy with an egg-sized lump growing out of his forehead and bloodstains on his pajamas, tied to a pole in the middle of the quadrangle, that he did something he had vowed never, ever to do. He asked a question about the practices going on behind the closed doors of the Little Brothers of Perpetual Succour.

  His Grace was informed that the child was an evil sinner and had deliberately soiled his bedsheets, but the bishop had already stopped listening to the flustered self-justification of the vice-rector. He was staring at one of Vicente’s hands. He grabbed the child’s wrist and turned the hand as much as he could against the rope that bound him to the pole, and managed to see the origin of the bleeding – an open palm wound. Quickly he grasped the other hand, and then crossed himself with a guttural prayer in Latin. He ordered the boy to be unbound and placed in his car. The vice-rector complied with a look of knowing malice. He had always suspected that His Grace harbored the same kind of evil proclivities he and his fellow brothers enjoyed.

  Contrary to the brother’s vindictive thoughts, the bishop was a kind and decent man, who would never have laid a finger upon either child or adult; a prelate who had learnt to repress his sexual desires under the comforting weight of numbing prayer, repetitive administrative duties and copious amounts of food and drink. But his lack of lust was not matched by a lack of gullibility, a fact attested to by the piece of the True Cross which he had purchased for an exorbitant amount from a traveling charlatan and which was now mounted above the painting of the Pietà in his cathedral, much venerated by the faithful.

  Vicente was driven to the bishop’s palace, where he was carefully bathed by two nuns, an elderly mother and a novice, neither of whom had ever seen the male anatomy before. As His Grace had requested, they were very careful with the wounds in the boy’s
palms. Vicente moaned piteously when the sisters gently washed them. Afterwards, when the child was clean and had been dressed in the only available clothes – those of an altar boy – Vicente was brought before the bishop, who blessed his hand wounds with holy water and told him that he was a stigmatist.

  Although Vicente had spent eighteen months in a parochial orphanage, His Grace soon understood that his religious instruction had been poor. Vicente knew very little beyond some rudimentary catechism – a few parables and common prayers, some of the Commandments, and snatches of liturgical response, learnt parrot-fashion. He hadn’t even heard of St Francis of Assisi, let alone Padre Pio. The bishop sat down with the boy and told him that the wounds in his hands were a sign of his devout goodness. God had chosen him to lead the way through suffering.

  The bishop could see that his words distressed the boy, which he found perfectly normal. A calling of this magnitude was bound to be alarming. He told the nuns to give Vicente a sleeping draft, but all they could find was some red altar wine, to which they added honey and spices.

  Vicente spent three days in comfort, amongst kind people, without any threat of physical or sexual abuse. Three days in which he was told that he had been chosen by God himself to lead an increasingly secular humanity back to Christ. And then he noticed that his wounds were healing. At night he picked at the scabs, tears of pain in his eyes, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t stop nature from taking its course. Over the next few days, the inevitable happened. The sacred wounds were no longer just healing, they were closing. For the first time in his life, Vicente prayed. Not the mindless chatter of repetition – more an exercise in oral agility than a heartfelt prayer – but words of his own choosing, addressed to a presence he had never believed in: God. Vicente asked God to make the bishop’s words come true. Make him a holy boy. Make his holes come back.