Inspector Bonham made a slight bow and said, “Right-ee-o,” as if drawing on his British heritage. Then he stood, swept the laptop off the desk, and wedged it into its case.
“Your man told me you’re looking for a contractor to repair a roof,” he said, moving toward the door.
“You must have had quite a long conversation with Domingo.”
Bonham shrugged.
“It’s the dome,” Riordan said. “It’s two centuries old. A tricky job. But I don’t see that our roof is any concern of yours.”
“It could be. You never know. I might be able to find somebody. And if they’re jumpy about coming out here, I could provide a police escort.”
“Another one of your quid pro quos?”
“I won’t need to rely on that, wouldn’t you say, Padre Tim?”
The percipient look on Bonham’s face made the question rhetorical.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She loved the courtyard at any time of the day, but she loved it most in late afternoon, the mellow-yellow hour she called it, for the tone of the light. It fell not as sunlight does through a window but more like a mist, sifting down on the fountain, the plants, the floor’s square paving stones. Her house dated to 1796; the year of its construction and the names of the Spaniards who’d built it were chiseled into the keystone arch above the front entrance: Don Francisco y Doña Isabella de Monteczuma, the surname marking Don Francisco as mixed race, a descendant of Aztec royalty.
The place had been a ruin, abandoned for decades, when she bought it for next to nothing. Restoring it to livable condition, converting the sala into a clinic and then equipping it, had cost considerably more than nothing. With her savings almost depleted, she’d been reduced to bartering for tradesmen’s services: free treatment for new wiring; free examinations for new plumbing.
The courtyard being a luxury, its renovation came last. The fountain—a griffin standing on its hind legs in a basin shaped like a seashell—was sandblasted, the broken clay pipes replaced with copper. In the mellow-yellow hour, listening to the splash of water spit from the griffin’s beak, Lisette would sit with a glass of wine and imagine Don Francisco and Doña Isabella joining her for cocktails. Sometimes, after one glass too many, the reins on her imagination slipped, and she conducted make-believe conversations with those ghosts, telling them about the commonplace events of her day, now and then relating a tragedy or comedy for contrast.
She was like a lonely child, inventing playmates to fill her solitude. Was that all Pamela was to her? In her ideal conception of love, Lisette thought, Pamela’s happiness should be her first concern. This pulled her to another, more fundamental question she’d been trying to resolve: Was she in love? She’d approached it like a diagnosis, eliminating possibilities to arrive at the correct answer. She was drawn to Pamela’s glamour and upscale style, but that wasn’t love. Nor was the protectiveness aroused by Pamela’s mania. Meds held it in check, though not always. During one of their weekend trysts in Tucson, she had stayed up all night rearranging her furniture, and woke Lisette at five a.m., crying, “Come look! Look what I’ve done to the place! Don’t you love it! Tell me you love it!” That excitability, that neediness. Lisette wished she could throw herself, self-sacrificially, between Pamela and her neurochemical demons. If that was love, it was the maternal kind. She wondered, now, if probing the heart’s motives was stupid. You knew intuitively when you were in love; if analysis was required, might that be a sign that you weren’t?
“There. There,” Pamela said now. They were in the courtyard, where she was applying finishing touches to a white cardboard poster, propped on a table against one of the pillars supporting the arcade. She stepped aside as if unveiling a portrait or an epic landscape. “Don’t you think that’s way better?”
Lisette agreed. The poster was a big improvement over the one she’d produced weeks earlier. On the left side, under the green-lettered word “Sí!,” vegetables spilled from a cornucopia; on the right, under a red-lettered “No!,” lay a trash pile of soda cans and junk-food wrappers. Pamela had drawn the images with photographic realism. Beneath them, neat columns listed the cornucopia’s bounty—phytonutrients from blue corn, purple carrots, purple potatoes—and the evil fruits of Coke, Fritos, pizza—salt, sugar, trans fats. The poster was to be a visual aid in Lisette’s nutrition classes, held monthly for San Patricio’s housewives and schoolchildren.
“You done good, girl,” she said. “You made the corn and carrots look appetizing and the crap repulsive.”
“First representational stuff I’ve done in years,” Pamela said with a laugh. She sat down, facing the poster, her back to Lisette, and picked up the cigarette in the plate dragooned into service as an ashtray. She was a social smoker, no more than two or three a day. Lisette considered it disgusting but didn’t make an issue of it.
“Thanks for taking the trouble. I hope not to make a sign painter out of you.”
“Hey! Anything for the cause. What is the cause, exactly?”
“Preventive medicine! Mexicans are the número uno consumers of junk food on the planet! Half the people I see have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, immune systems fucked from the garbage they stuff into their mouths. If they can go back to eating the way they did a hundred years ago—”
Pamela turned and, looking at Lisette with gentle merriment, raised her hands. “Puh-leeze! I was only kidding.”
“About what?”
“Asking what the cause is. You’ve told me.”
Lisette chuckled at herself. “I can’t help it. It’s my grand passion.”
“Not too grand, I hope. Not so grand it doesn’t leave room.”
She’d styled her hair in the way Lisette liked, pinned up with a butterfly clip. It emphasized her classic looks, exposed the full length of her pretty neck, which Lisette now kissed.
“Room aplenty. If the ladies and their kids weren’t coming in half an hour…”
“Tonight,” Pamela said, promise in her voice. She folded her arms across her breasts, tight, athletic, half again as big as baseballs. “Save it for tonight. It feels like it’ll be a cold one.”
“Snow predicted down to two thousand meters. We’re at fifteen hundred. Ever think you’d see snow in Mexico?”
“Nope. But then I never thought I’d spend a morning in a church with a Catholic priest and find that I liked him.”
“Tim’s all right. Not the doctrinaire type.”
“He knows you’re gay, right?”
“Sure. A while back, when rumors started that I was the padre’s secret squeeze, he got nervous about a scandal. No worries, I told him, I don’t like boys. Never did.”
“What did he say?”
“That it would stay between him and me. He warned me that his parishioners were pretty conservative when it came to that, the women especially. If they knew, or even suspected, I could lose them as patients. Their kids, too. No problema, I said. I’d grown up among hellfire evangelicals. I knew how to behave. So how did it go with Tim?”
“All right, I guess. He said there was enough work for a team, but I suppose I could get a start on it.”
“You agreed, then? You’ll come down and do it?” Striving not to sound too hopeful, too avid. Because this was so pleasant; it made her feel complete to sit in her own courtyard, conversing with a woman she cared for.
“I didn’t agree. I didn’t turn him down. I’ll have to think about it.”
“What is there to think about?” She wanted to take the words back as soon as she spoke them. Too sharp, too demanding.
“Are you kidding?” Pamela said, and held up a finger. “One: like I keep telling you and him, it’s been years since I’ve done restorations.” Another finger popped up. “Two: I wouldn’t want it to interfere with my own work.” And another. “Three: I don’t speak Spanish. I can’t even ask where the bathroom is.”
Too much time in resorts where everybody speaks English, Lisette thought as she said, “Dónde está el
baño. Give it a try.”
Pamela bristled. “Come on, I know that much.”
“Sorry. Look, I’m not asking you to throw your whole life over. Only to spend a few months down here. We can see how things work out.”
“There’s a couple of other things.” She squinted at Lisette—a pained expression, as if to show how difficult it was to say what she was about to say. “It’s weird down here, and dangerous besides, and I don’t do danger very well. Those two guys who stopped us, the way the one looked at me, it made me feel like he was smearing slime all over me. And then there’s what you said a minute ago. That you know how to behave. Back into the closet?”
“Más o menos. More or less.”
“That’s easy if you’re alone. So what would I have to do? Make off that I’m just your friend or roommate or whatever? God forbid anybody catches us holding hands? I’m not sure I can go back to living that way, even for a little while. Are you saying you can?”
Ah, Lisette thought. Here is the main objection. She had had the same doubts herself, anticipating the strains that came from leading a double life. But they did not trouble her half as much as they seemed to trouble Pamela; for there had always been a hidden side to Lisette, an alter ego who liked being a sexual renegade. This part of her had taken a covert pleasure in shocking her family, and in their rejection of her. It was an anarchic streak that rebelled against any orthodoxy, finding the pieties of the gay rights movement a load of crap and the new tolerance of gays boring, the lukewarm bath of acceptance transforming social outlaws into bourgeois sanctioned to marry and adopt. Hot, once-prohibited kisses cooled into matrimonial pecks. Your turn to drive the kids to soccer practice, dear, I’ve got to mow the lawn. The romantic outrider in her believed that if eros was crushed by too much repression, it was shallowed by too little. Imagine Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in a New England that winked at adultery. Yes, she and Pamela would have to sail their love boat under false colors in San Patricio. Fear of discovery would attend them daily; but deception’s thrills would compensate for its anxieties. Not to mention the zip and zing of pent-up desires released in cloistered darkness.
But she wasn’t about to reveal this secret self to Pamela, whose hands she now clasped. “I’m saying that it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if that’s what it takes to be with you,” she said, with an earnestness not entirely genuine since it would not be entirely a sacrifice.
Pamela looked to her cigarette, three-quarters ash. She’d been put on the spot, unfairly, childishly. If you’re not willing, then you don’t really care for me.
“It’s a lot to think about,” she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Quiroga brothers lived across the street from each other in new houses (new being defined in San Patricio as anything built within the last century), stucco over cinder blocks, Adan’s sand-colored, Domingo’s white. They took turns taking care of their mother, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. This month was Domingo’s turn, as today, Saturday, it was Riordan’s turn to give Communion to the pueblo’s shut-ins. Letitia Quiroga was his first call of the morning, a morning sharp with the penetrating cold of the high desert, a light snow flocking the junipers on the upper hillsides.
Domingo’s wife, Delores, answered the door. She was tall for a Mexican woman, five-eight or so, with quick, alert eyes and a tough-cookie temperament. Looking past Riordan at the two federales parked in front of Adan’s house in an unmarked car, the engine running for warmth, she expelled a dry, scornful spit at the floor.
“Half asleep, I’ll bet. I myself could come up to them and shoot them both, pah-pah, before they could ask God’s forgiveness.”
He entered the house and blew on his hands and held them in front of a gas space heater before going into Letitia’s bedroom with his kit. She was sitting in a wheelchair, her fingers frozen into talons. Her lips and tongue quivered spastically when she took the host and sipped the wine. Cuerpo de Cristo, sangre de Cristo. He spoke to her for a minute or two, then went into the kitchen, where Domingo was eating huevos rancheros.
“Sentarse, Padre, I’ll make you something,” Delores said.
He declined, but accepted her offer of coffee and sat down with her and Domingo to talk over what had happened. The cuota demanded had been ten percent of the bakery’s weekly sales. Adan, who had taken the call, had not recognized the extortionist’s voice. Nor had he or Domingo recognized the collectors who’d shown up early yesterday morning; they were masked. The federales arrested them without a struggle. Domingo did not agree with his brother about bringing the cops into it. He did not trust the cops. He did not trust anybody. He suspected that Roberto García, the young employee who worked the register and helped count receipts at the end of the day, had been in on the deal. Without someone on the inside to tell them, how would the extortionists know how much the bakery earned?
“They wouldn’t need Roberto, a little clerk. They know everything,” Delores said.
“Why didn’t you say something to me yesterday?” Riordan asked. “I had no idea. You acted like nothing was wrong.”
“One becomes good at acting,” Domingo said. “We should all be in the cinema.” He was a saturnine man by nature, lean and long-jawed, with concave cheeks, and today he looked and sounded more morose than usual. “We act like we do not see what we see or hear what we hear. We pretend not to know what we know. And so we live in—”
“Una casa silencio,” Riordan said.
“Sí. But not my brother.”
Then a switch, slightly delayed, flipped in Riordan’s memory. “Last week, you left me a note that a García wanted to make an appointment with me. You didn’t say which García. It was this Roberto?”
“No, no,” Domingo said. “A different one, an older man. Jamie.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No.”
* * *
As he emerged from the base stockade, on whose floor the two cuota collectors lay semiconscious in dried puddles of their own urine, the Professor blinked against the glare from the razor wire coiling along the top of the walls. The wire produced a sound heard only by him. The shape, those bright, sharp spirals, produced it: a low sibilance, like the singing of distant locusts except that it didn’t vary in pitch. He crossed the drill field, half of which was taken up by the wall tents housing the Federal Police under his command, the other half a parking lot for the operation’s vehicles. Clods of mud from melted snow flew out from under the boots of the paratroopers jogging around the perimeter to a martial chant, steam puffing from their nostrils and mouths. The words were different but the rhythm was identical to the one he’d sung when he was with the 82nd, and it created a shape only he could see: a reddish diamond flickering in time to the cadence. He had had synesthesia since childhood; it was as though the barrier between his ears and eyes did not exist, allowing him to hear forms and colors even as he saw sounds.
He scraped his shoes before entering the headquarters for 1st Compañía, 3rd Batallón, Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas, commanded by Capitán Primero Alberto Valencia.
He was standing before a wall map, large as a queen-sized bedsheet, with a sergeant and a sublieutenant. Two clerks were attending to paperwork, while a third soldier sat by a silent radio, almost asleep and no wonder: the propane heater made the room feel positively tropical.
“Inspector Bonham,” Valencia said, turning. “It would have been a courtesy to ask permission before entering. We are in conference.”
The Professor repressed an impulse to say that he’d stopped asking permission when he was a schoolboy. He was, after all, co-commander here, in practice if not on paper.
“My apologies. I didn’t know.”
Valencia gestured forgiveness. “No matter. We are just now finishing up.”
After the captain dismissed the two underlings, the Professor moved to the map, its acetate cover decorated with arrows and runic military symbols drawn in grease pencil. Valencia pressed a finger o
n a square, in which widely spaced contour lines indicated gently sloping land and scattered black dots the village of Mesa Verde.
“We got a tip about this place. A poppy field somewhere nearby. Also a refinery for making la negra.”
La negra—Mexican black tar heroin. The Brotherhood was responding to market changes. Heroin was on the comeback trail in gringoland, the new junkies not street rats or jazz musicians but Mr. and Mrs. Everyday American, cut off from their OxyContin prescriptions.
“The tip—who from?”
“Anonymous. It could be bullshit, of course. I’m sending the sublieutenant and five men to check it out, as soon as I get authorization from the general.”
Valencia made a face like he was in pain, because he had to take orders from a “straight-leg,” that is, a non-paratrooper: Brigadier General Diego Carrillo, commanding the 2nd Military Region and Joint Operation Falcon, the combined army–Federal Police campaign to smash Salazar’s cartel.
“I would think,” said the Professor, “that you shouldn’t have to ask permission from a general to send out a five-man patrol. Or are you just being courteous?”
“Your sarcasm is noted. And it’s six, counting the subteniente.”
“It would be better to make this reconnaissance by helicopter. But I suppose getting one would require authorization.”
“Por supuesto.”
“I could get you one of ours, Alberto.” The Professor addressed him by his first name to reestablish the fact that they were equals.
“Gracias, pero eso no será necesario.”
Valencia’s pride was the reason it would not be necessary. His elite troops in a police helicopter? Never. Besides, it would be unauthorized. This was why, the Professor thought, deploying the army to fight the Brotherhood had been a mistake. It was a lumbering bison; its adversary, a wolf pack, light, nimble, and quick. All armies were hierarchical, naturally, but there was none quite so hierarchical, so hermetic and rigidly rule-bound as the Mexican. Christ, Valencia probably had to put in a requisition to take a piss. He was himself incorruptible, unlike some military officers the Professor had known; but his virtue harbored a flaw: it made him inflexible and self-righteous. The Professor was very flexible, a moral athlete who for years had hopped from one side of the law to the other; and he had never been accused of righteousness.
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