But how? he asked himself. How?
* * *
He rode Negra Modelo through town only when necessary; the narrow streets amplified the sound of its 1,300cc engine to an ear-splitting roar.
The walk to César Díaz’s house took him across the plaza and under an arcade covering the sidewalk that ran past tiendas and the town hall, its doors guarded by two federales in blue-black uniforms, its coral-pink walls papered with handwritten signs. Afuera con la Fraternidad! Muerte a la Fraternidad!
Only a few weeks ago, before the army’s arrival, before Díaz’s vigilantes reclaimed the streets from Brotherhood goons cruising in pickups with smoked windows, no one would have dared post such messages in public. Even with the improved security, these—“Out with the Brotherhood! Death to the Brotherhood!”—had been put up in the middle of the night; you never knew if La Fraternidad’s operatives were watching.
The lights were on inside the town hall, functionaries busy making sure the water ran and the trash got picked up, the machinery of municipal routine clanking along even though San Patricio no longer had a government to speak of. Since the assassinations of the police chief and his two officers, the municipal cops did little more than issue parking tickets. The autodefensa had become its de facto police force, as the mayor’s secretary had become the de facto mayor, the elected one and all four council members having fled. “They ran away with nobody chasing them,” César had joked, adapting, Riordan supposed, the line from Proverbs: “The wicked flee when no man pursues.” A fear of retribution, springing from guilty consciences, had convinced them to pack their bags. The mayor and the councilmen had been collecting “taxes”—that is, extortion payments for the Brotherhood—and sharing in the profits.
A shopkeeper greeted him, as did a woman sweeping dust from the sidewalk and the driver of a pickup transporting five-gallon water jugs. Buenas tardes, Padre Tim! Dios los bendiga! Riordan felt as much as heard the warmth in their voices. Yes, to Father Hugo (and the other priests in the diocese), he would always be an outsider; but his parishioners loved him, requiting his love for them. You are more respected than the mayor ever was, César had told him. That wasn’t a great accomplishment—a stray dog would have earned more respect—yet he couldn’t help but feel a flush of pride, a reaction, perhaps, to the humiliation he’d suffered at Captain Valencia’s hands. Pissing in the corners to mark his territory. I have the power, gringo priest, to make you grovel in the dirt.
He emerged from the arcade and headed up Calle Insurgentes, climbing steeply between villas built by Spanish silver barons more than two centuries ago, now carved into apartments for grocers, mechanics, waiters from the pueblo’s only hotel. One of the dwellings had been restored to its former elegance by an American expat who, heeding the State Department’s warnings, hadn’t occupied it for two years. Riordan began to feel the climb in his calves and lungs as he went by Lisette Moreno’s house and clinic, shaded by an enormous mesquite said to be over three hundred years old. The past alive in the present, like the archaic light from distant stars.
Then came an antiquated sound: the clatter of shod hooves on cobblestones. A man with a face as fissured as a dried date sat astride a light-boned bay, his posture erect and proud. A would-be caballero, though he was in reality a guide who, in the days before the narco wars, had taken visitors touring the Mission Trail on pony treks through the countryside. Another encouraging sight. Not very long ago, he wouldn’t have had the temerity to be out on the streets, exercising a horse.
But his ride, Riordan knew, would not take him beyond the militia’s trenches and checkpoints. It would not take him to the outlying ranches, farms, and villages, or to the Indian settlements in the Sierra, or anywhere near the tenebrous canyons where the poppies and the cannabis grew and meth brewed in the Brotherhood’s labs. Riordan, Father Hugo, and Dr. Moreno were among the few who could venture safely into those parts, the two priests protected by their poverty, Lisette by her profession. Narcos suffered headaches and fevers like anyone else, not to mention gunshot wounds.
He paused at the top of the hill to catch his breath, then walked on to César’s compound. Behind it, his walnut trees marched in orderly ranks, many of them fire-blackened. A cracked adobe wall with an iron gate surrounded two flat-roofed, mud-brick casitas facing each other across a dirt courtyard. Three young men, César’s security detail, slouched against the wall, pistols jammed in their waistbands. The only one Riordan knew, Moises Ortega, had a rifle slung crosswise over his back. No rusty rabbit gun, but a cuerno de chivo. Moises was smoking a joint, which he flipped into the street when he saw Riordan approaching.
“Yo! Padre Tim,” he called, displaying a sheepish grin, followed by some elaborate acrobatics with his fingers—a gangbanger’s salute.
“I could smell it, you know,” Riordan said. “You three look like you couldn’t guard a chicken coop.”
“Hey, we’re cool. Read-ee for anything.”
Moises and his companions were San Patricio natives who had lived most of their young lives in Los Angeles, acquiring a command of English and a facility with firearms in barrio turf battles. They’d been deported back to their hometown, following convictions on drug and weapons charges, and promptly enlisted in the self-defense force. They liked to romanticize themselves as bad guys gone good, putting their criminal skills to righteous use, like the outlaws in The Magnificent Seven.
“So, Moises, que tal? What’s happening?” Riordan asked, pointing at a van parked across the street, its panel lettered XHNOA-TV.
“César’s being interviewed.” Moises was now all restless energy, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, twitching his head, the silver crucifix draped from his neck swinging pendulum-like across his protective vest. “National TV, man. He’ll be, like, a celebrity.”
Riordan stood on tiptoe to peer over the wall into the courtyard. He was looking over the reporter’s shoulder directly at César. Clad in the same too-tight shirt and suit jacket he’d worn at yesterday’s funeral, sitting stiffly in a plastic chair, a small mike clipped to his collar, his eyes flitting in search of something to fix on, he didn’t look like a celebrity. More like a suspect undergoing interrogation.
“Please! Look at me or at the camera,” said the reporter, a woman with short black hair.
His wandering gaze settled on the camera, shouldered by a sallow-cheeked man in a satin baseball jacket. A technician squatted nearby, fiddling with audio equipment while a slab of meat and muscle stood off to the side, an assault rifle in his hand. Mexican reporters also needed bodyguards. In matters of news management, the narcos were as lacking in nuance as they were in their business methods. Any number of journalists had been murdered for writing or speaking the truth.
The reporter leafed through the notebook in her lap. “You have told us what happened at the demonstration,” she said. “But let me ask one thing: The autodefensa still refuses to disarm?”
“Yes, that’s right,” César replied.
“Under what circumstances would you give up your weapons?”
“When the army brings us their heads.”
Moises, squatting beside Riordan at the window, pumped his fist and whispered: “The boss is a badass.”
“Excuse me, ‘heads’?” the reporter asked, startled by the response. “Whose heads?”
“Ernesto Salazar and his lieutenants, Enrique Mora, the one they call El Serpiente, and Rubén Levya, who is known as El Tigre Negro. The Snake and the Black Jaguar. Do you know the nickname for Salazar? La Mariposa.”
She tilted her head. “The Butterfly? Why?”
“Because he has never been married, never has no girlfriends.”
“You said you want the authorities to bring you their heads? Do you mean—”
“No! Not to chop off their heads. But we want them dead. We want to see their bodies. And we want the DNA, for proof that they got the right guys. These fraternidarios, you know, they work miracles. They do miraculous things.”
“Such as…?”
“Resurrections. They rise from the dead.” César put on a look of mock astonishment. “Levya is two times reported to be killed and both times he is later seen walking around. Is this because the Jaguar is a cat having nine lives? No, it is a miracle. The same with Salazar. I think he has been killed three times and all three risen from the dead. A very great miracle. Even Jesus rose only once. So we want the DNA for proof that they are truly dead. Then we will surrender our weapons.”
Riordan, relieved that his friend wouldn’t go on national TV calling for beheadings, was nonetheless alarmed. César’s remarks were rash, to say the least.
The reporter’s pen danced across her notebook; then she flipped its pages with a snappy flourish, like a card dealer finishing a shuffle. “One more question. These vigilante groups like yours—”
“We are not vigilantes!” César interrupted, voice rising in indignation. “We don’t take the law into our own hands, because now, here, there is no longer any law to take! We are only defending ourselves. No one else will. The army, the Federal Police, they ride around in their SandCats, they patrol the plaza, and we tell them, Salazar is not in the plaza, he is in the mountains. Go after him. And what do they do? They try to take our weapons away from us. They shoot us.”
“But to my question. There are rumors that Carrasco is delighted by the appearance of the autodefensas in Sonora. They do his fighting for him, then he returns from exile to reclaim his narco kingdom. What do you say to that?”
César made a chopping movement with one hand. “I know nothing about what delights Señor Carrasco. Nobody does. Nobody knows where he is or even if he is still alive, so what I say to these rumors is that they are mierda.”
* * *
César filled two shot glasses from the unlabeled bottle on the table as he and Riordan sat across from each other in his living room, its sky-blue stucco walls bare except for two images that delivered mixed messages: a poster showing a half-naked beauty caressing a bottle of Pacifico beer and a framed photograph, cut from a magazine, of a life-sized statue of the crucified Christ. The Lord of Atil, it was called, named after the Sonoran town where it stood.
The two men clinked glasses: Salud, Salud. César drained his with one quick gulp while Riordan sipped his. The clear, silvery liquid, at first cold on his tongue, slid down his throat like warm mercury.
“Eh! Padre Tim! That’s no way to treat a bacanora like this one. My cousin Javier made it. El néctar puro de agave puro.”
They were conversing in the hybridized lingo of the border, Spanglish. César, a citizen of the United States and Mexico, had worked many years for a produce shipper on the Arizona side of Nogales.
“Such purity should be savored,” Riordan said.
“Mierda! It has authority. It must be drunk with authority.”
“All right. Con autoridad.” He downed the drink, and the warm mercury hit his gut, then shot into his brain. “Que sabe bien, que Dios me perdóne.”
“You have said it many times. He pardons us all.”
“Little children and Irish drunks especially.”
“You are not a drunk.”
“No. But my father was, and I have an older brother who is. How was it to be interviewed for TV?”
“My first time. How did I do, you think?”
“No tan mal. You seemed a little nervous.”
“Not because it was my first time. Because I was angry and I was worried I would say the wrong thing.” He lifted the bottle. “Otro vez?”
Riordan shook his head. “One is enough.”
César poured another shot for himself and drank it off as he had the first, his cheeks flushing so that Riordan was reminded of a reddened moon.
“The nephew I raised like a son is in his grave, and over there”—motioning out a window at the casita across the way—“my wife comforts my sister. Thank God Lupita has two other children. I think she would kill herself if she didn’t. I was worried I would say, you know, ‘The chingado goddamned army and Federal Police should be fighting the chingado Brotherhood, and instead they kill my nephew and the Reyes boy, those chingado cabrones.’ You will forgive my language, Padre Tim? I am still angry.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard worse.” Riordan hesitated, marshaling his thoughts. “But that’s what you did say, in different words. Valencia won’t be pleased. And when Salazar hears that you want him dead, that you want his DNA for God’s sake, he’ll double the contract that’s out on you.”
Doubt crossed César’s face. Riordan sensed that he regretted his intemperate words. But it was only for a moment; self-doubt and regret were not part of his makeup.
“Let him triple it—I don’t give a shit,” he said, falling back into his natural machismo. He’d formed the autodefensa after La Fraternidad, desiring a share in the bounty from his walnut orchard, set it on fire when he refused to pay. Everyone told him to take his losses, consider himself fortunate, blessed of God, that the arsonists did not toast him along with his walnuts. César would have none if it. They want war, he had declared, I’ll give them what they want.
“I’ve come to tell you what passed between me and Valencia,” Riordan said.
“Así. Dime.”
Riordan censored his account, redacting Valencia’s proposal, which he couldn’t risk revealing even to a friend like César.
“Valencia made you lie in the dirt at the point of a gun?” César asked when he’d finished. “Like you were a criminal?”
“I told you he wasn’t fond of priests.”
César was silent for a moment. Then: “I am disappointed.”
In the outcome or in me? Riordan asked himself. Or in both? Bending forward, he reached across the table to clasp César’s knee.
“An apology from an army officer? You knew that would be expecting the impossible.”
“Tal vez sea así. All the same, I must have expected something, because I have this disappointment. And I’m disappointed because something is expected of me. I am expected to do something about what happened to Hector and Ángel.”
“Who has these expectations?”
“The Reyes family. My sister. Those boys out there guarding my house. Everyone. I expect it of myself.” He sat back, hands on his knees. “I have an idea. I need your advice.”
With a swipe of his hand, Riordan told him to go ahead.
“I know the human rights commissioner for Sonora. I am considering asking him to file a complaint, to demand an investigation. What do you think?”
Riordan coughed into his hand and pointed at the bottle. “Permiso?”
“Ah, so one wasn’t enough. Por favor.”
But as Riordan raised the shot glass to his lips, his eyes lifted to the Lord of Atil. It was only a photo of a statue, the image of an image, and yet it shamed him, for this Jesus was not the film-star-handsome Jesus who swooned gracefully in sanitized crucifixions in American churches. This Jesus, his skin dirty ivory—the pallor of death—his mouth half open in the rictus of a stifled scream, blood from the crown of thorns and the nails and the spearpoint’s gash skeining his face, his arms, and his ribs, inspired horror rather than sweet reverence, and so portrayed more honestly the profound agony the incarnate God had endured to redeem a fallen world.
He lowered the glass and with two fingers pushed it toward César. “You drink it.”
“I’ve had two, and that’s enough for me.”
“All right, then…” Riordan poured the contents of the glass back into the bottle, taking care not to spill any. “I should be saying my afternoon prayers, not drinking.”
César glanced at the photo, then back at Riordan, and twisted his thin lips into a knowing but indulgent smile. “I don’t think he’ll mind at all. Sometimes you are too hard on yourself.”
True enough, Riordan thought. He suffered from false guilt—scruples, the church called it—an overactive conscience producing fears that certain thoughts, desires, or acts were sinful which
in fact were not. He couldn’t account for his malady. Like his terror of heights, it was woven into the tapestry of his being, though it seemed to prick him whenever he felt that he had fallen short, as he did now.
César recapped the bottle and said, “So what do you think? Is my idea a good one, a bad one?”
“These human rights commissioners are ornaments,” Riordan replied evasively. He was afraid, now, that whatever advice he gave would be wrong. “The Mexican government decorates itself with them so it can pretend it’s a real democracy.”
“Come on, Padre Tim. People want me to do something. I’m the chief of the militia, and it was my nephew the soldiers killed. I’m asking what you think I should do.”
“I’m the wrong one to ask. It’s not a thing for a priest.”
“And what is?”
“Perhaps I should visit Lupita.”
César whipped his head side to side. “That is also not for a priest. Right now she is angry with God. She’ll get over it, but she has been cursing God all afternoon. I cannot promise that she won’t curse you.”
“You said my sermon was a great succor to her.”
“It was good manners to say that.”
Riordan was silent. As a man who needed to be needed, hearing that he not only wasn’t but might cause harm made him feel as useless as a doctor with no remedies in his bag.
“I think maybe you’re right,” César sighed. “None of this has been a thing for a priest. I should have gone to Valencia myself.”
Some Rise by Sin Page 5
