Some Rise by Sin Page 2

  “Exactly. Migrants heading north. Kidnapped and executed when their ransoms weren’t paid. That’s more than barbarism. It’s delight in barbarism. That’s what Father was saying.” He inclined his head toward the Old Priest. “And it’s what the newspaper will not say, so they invent this nonsense about terrorizing one’s enemies. It’s inhuman, it’s demonic.”

  “But the Beast has been defeated,” Father Hugo said. Whether he was being sincere or uttering another ironic comment, Riordan couldn’t tell.

  “He seems to be holding his own in Mexico,” Riordan said. “Sixty thousand murdered in six years! Tell me, if it’s not the work of the devil, then how does a country that produces Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes produce people capable of such things?”

  Father Hugo stood and rinsed his plate in the sink. “In the same way that the country that produced William Faulkner produces maniacs who massacre people in cinemas and schools.”

  “I knew you’d say something like that.”

  “What did you expect?” Dripping a little venom into the question. “A gringo has no standing to lecture about the evils of violence.”

  Riordan had been the pastor in San Patricio for four years. But, he thought, he would always be the gringo here, the stranger who usurped the pastoral seat from a worthy Mexican, like his vicar.

  “I wasn’t lecturing,” he said. “Remember what happened to our police chief three years ago.”

  “Who can forget it?”

  “It was thought through, it was planned.”

  “Your meaning is…?”

  “The sicarios who did that were not crazy. It was an insane act committed by sane men.”

  “Cómo se dicé in inglés? A distinction with no difference?”

  “There is a difference. It’s moral insanity. And it’s spread all over this country. A spiritual epidemic.”

  “What happened the day before yesterday was very tragic, but it wasn’t sicarios who did it. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It wasn’t deliberate. It was an accident. The soldiers fired over the heads of the crowd.”

  “It would seem not high enough,” Riordan said.

  * * *

  Father Hugo’s forecast had been accurate: In every pew people sat shoulder to shoulder. More stood in the back. Still more would have jammed the side aisles if those weren’t blocked by scaffolding. Up until a few months ago, painters and artisans had been restoring the chipped and faded murals of saints and biblical scenes and the inevitable Virgin of Guadalupe. The project had been suspended because the workers came from elsewhere, and the roads into San Patricio had grown too dangerous to travel, even in daylight. Halting the work was a bitter disappointment for Riordan. Beauty, the harmony of shapes and colors, fostered harmony in human beings. He believed that as deeply as he believed in the communion of saints, though he lacked even the flimsiest evidence to support either proposition. The statuary and artwork in this church was said to rival that in the church at Xavier del Bac, in Arizona. His friend and fellow Franciscan Kieran McCarty had overseen its restoration, an achievement Riordan hoped to emulate here. He clung to that hope as much for his parishioners’ sake as for his own. They mustn’t think he’d given up. That was why he’d ordered the scaffolding to remain in place; to take it down would signal surrender as surely as lowering a flag.

  Two simple pinewood coffins, closed because the bullets had cleaved both boys’ skulls, were laid end to end at the foot of the altar. The Díaz family occupied the front pew on the right side of the aisle, the Reyes family on the left. Hector’s and Ángel’s mothers, dressed in mourning, sat primly, hands folded in their laps, faces blank.

  Riordan led them and the congregation in the act of penitence, and as sometimes happened when he recited the words “in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,” the face of another dead young man flickered in his memory and he beat his breast in the thrice-repeated mea culpa with more sincerity than usual. I, too, crawl with sin, he thought. I am marinated in it.

  César Díaz, wearing a dark suit jacket and a white shirt too small for his neck, went to the pulpit to deliver the scriptural readings. He had a bulldog’s nose and a cratered face, but his voice, an orator’s, diverted attention from his looks. He read the passages from Ezekiel and Romans as if he were addressing a crowd through a bullhorn. “O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise.… If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall live with Him.” César, owner of a walnut orchard, head of the agrarian union, and chief of San Patricio’s autodefensa (vigilantes, they were called in the press), was probably the reason the church had been filled. Parishioners wanted to show him respect. Then, too, his nephew had fallen to army bullets. If Hector and his friend had been killed by La Fraternidad—the Brotherhood—there probably would have been fewer mourners. You did not want the cartel to think you grieved for its victims, lest you become one. But the army was a different story. The soldiers, even though they could play rough, were under some restraints, so people were not as afraid of them.

  In the choir loft, the organist played the notes to the “Alleluia,” the congregation sang it, and Riordan, garbed in black vestments, took his place at the pulpit to read the gospel—from Luke, chapter 7, “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for comfort, but of thee, O Lord”—followed by his homily, with its recycled sentiments. The Credo followed, then Communion, then the concluding rites. “May they rest in peace,” he said, looking past the coffins at the congregation. Townspeople mostly, a few Indians from the foothill villages, faces dark and secretive. “May almighty God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless you…” Thinking, Will He? Because he didn’t doubt that a few Brotherhood spies had infiltrated the service, keeping tabs on things. Those young men whose gold rings flashed as they sketched the sign of the cross with hands that had blood on them. “Go, the Mass is ended.”

  César signaled the pallbearers, who shuffled out of the pews, hoisted the coffins, and led the recessional down the center aisle. Outside, they loaded the coffins into the bed of a Ford F-350 that would serve as a hearse. In the plaza, in crisp winter sunlight, helmeted soldiers wearing ski masks stood in pairs, rifles slung across the fronts of their armored vests. They’d been cheered as liberators when they’d rolled into San Patricio less than two weeks ago; now the churchgoers eyed them with mingled fear and hostility. Riordan stood at the front doors and watched his congregation atomize, scattering across the plaza and down the streets angling from it like a wheel’s spokes.

  Only Hector’s and Ángel’s families, sorting out who would ride with whom to the cemetery, remained on the church steps. César shook Riordan’s hand and thanked him for his most excellent sermon, a great succor for his sister-in-law, Lupita. Riordan cringed inwardly at what he thought was an undeserved compliment. “Come with me, Padre Tim,” César said, donning a straw cowboy hat. “There is a thing I need to ask.”

  A few minutes later, his vestments exchanged for what he called “clerical fatigues”—a black jacket over a black shirt with white Roman collar—Riordan rode in the Ford with César at the head of the cortege. They proceeded slowly down cobblestoned Avenida Obregón, past colonial houses with pastel façades and iron-barred windows, then the Hotel Alameda and Quiroga’s bakery. César did not speak until they reached the tin-roofed taquerías and llanteras near the town limits.

  “I raised Hector like my own son, since my brother’s death,” he said. “To lose him like this…” He made a sound, not quite a hiss, not quite a sigh, to indicate that he couldn’t find the words. “I would like you to have a talk with that officer, that Captain Valencia.”

  “Me? What would you have me say?”

  “That if he wants our collaboration, he should apologize. Not to me only. Not to the Reyes family only. To the entire town. There was no need for his men to open fire.”

  César’s pickup labored up the steep grade to the cemetery, as if it were towing the cars and trucks behind it, and then followed the road
in its circle around the headstones. Colorful flowers, some real, some plastic, adorned the graves of others Riordan had buried. Most were under twenty-five, except for the police chief and two constables, slain in a Brotherhood ambush, and for a narco who had managed two unusual feats: he’d lived past forty, and he’d died not from gunfire but in an auto accident. He’d had enough money to rate a small marble tomb. A banner fluttered over it—NAZARIO, YOU ARE WITH US ALWAYS—and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, placed there on the Day of the Dead, two weeks ago, stood upright at the entrance, in case his soul needed a drink.

  César parked, his grille nearly kissing the rear of the last vehicle in the line, not a line now but a ring of metal forming, as it were, a protective barrier around the graves. Two fresh ones had been dug in the Díaz and Reyes family plots, each a miniature necropolis enclosed by low stone or cinder-block walls. The plots were side by side, which would allow Riordan to stand between them and conduct a single service for both boys.

  “Why don’t you speak to Valencia yourself?” he said to César.

  “He’d arrest me before I could open my mouth.”

  “It would be a job for a mayor, if we still had one.”

  “But we don’t. Besides, you are more respected than the mayor ever was.”

  “Not by Valencia, from what I’ve heard. It is said that he has no love for priests.”

  Outside, men were removing the coffins from the Ford’s bed. As the mourners began to exit their vehicles, grackles burst into flight from the trees, like dark blossoms torn and flurried by a strong wind. César opened his door to climb out, then paused, a foot on the running board, his hat brim casting a shadow across the lunar landscape of his face.

  “We don’t want him to love you, only to listen,” he said. “This Valencia has ambitions, I am told. He’s overdue for promotion. If he can be convinced to work with us instead of against us…”

  “I understand,” Riordan said. “Let’s talk about it later. It’s time to bury your nephew.”

  * * *

  Funeral masses and graveside rites, all the ceremonies of mourning, blunted the sting of irrecoverable loss; but once the last hymns and mumbled requiems had fallen silent, it struck like the pain of an amputation after the anesthetic has worn off. So it was that the sight of the coffins lowered by ropes into the raw graves and the thud and rattle of stony dirt striking the coffin lids tore from Hector’s and Ángel’s mothers primal cries of grief. There was no need now for the decorum they’d shown in church. They were in the deepest realms of sorrow, where sorrow, gorging the throat with its bile, can be tasted. Though they were only in their early forties, recovery would take more years than they had left to live.

  Anna Reyes was embraced by her husband, who tried to look strong and stoic; César held Lupita Díaz as she let out a howl, there on the hilltop, under a sky cold, blue, and void. Riordan’s familiarity with such lamentations did not make them any easier to bear. He heard clearly a hopelessness in the women’s shrieks, and it made him question how deeply they believed in the consolations of his sermon. I am Death, I have taken your sons from you forever was the voice they heard now. For the second time that day, Luis sprang into his mind. He recalled how he’d felt, reading about Luis’s death in a three-paragraph story deep inside the newspaper. Nothing even close to what these two women were suffering, but it allowed him to participate, however faintly, in their anguish. César, one arm around his sister-in-law’s shoulders, led her toward his pickup. When she was inside and the door shut, he glanced at Riordan, who whispered, “I’ll try to see Valencia. But surely you don’t expect an army officer to apologize.”

  “I have learned not to have expectations,” César said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next day, after bolting María’s lunch of tortilla soup, Riordan donned Levi’s and a black biker’s jacket and went out to the rectory veranda, where his Harley was sheltered, locked to a stout oak post. With a chamois, he wiped dust off the fenders and buffed the chrome headlight and tailpipe, a tenderness in his movements, as if he were currying a beloved horse. The bike deserved his respect and care. It had served him well for almost a decade; it had carried him nearly a thousand miles from his last assignment, in Los Angeles, to the new one in San Patricio without a single mechanical hitch. His arrival on it had caused a stir—a Harley-riding priest was a novelty. After they’d gotten used to the sight, the townspeople gave the bike a name: Negra Modelo, after the dark Mexican beer.

  He rubbed smudges off the gas tank, then put the chamois away. For no reason he could think of, the black metal’s gleam and the mirror-bright chrome made him a little more confident about meeting Captain Alberto Valencia. Not that his doubts were entirely dispelled. His role as emissary did not seem fitting for a parish priest, yet he was flattered that César had asked him to play it, as well as pleased that his friend wanted to do the Christian thing: make peace with the military rather than seek vengeance. No, César did not expect to win an apology or convince Valencia to cooperate with the militia; but such an outcome was not impossible. His nephew’s death had dealt him a strong hand. The plaza shootings reflected badly on the captain of paratroopers; he just might be willing to make amends.

  Riordan had never met Valencia and had seen him only once, riding in a Humvee with his troops. In the two days that had passed since the funeral, he had been debating with himself how best to approach the man, what attitude to strike. Angry and demanding wouldn’t do; neither would obsequious. In the end, he’d decided he would have to play it by ear and hope he hit the right notes.

  Bending at the waist, he checked his appearance in the sideview mirror. His thick gray hair, he thought, should give him a certain gravitas, while his nose, dented at the bridge and slightly askew—it had been broken more than thirty years ago—lent a tough-guy look to his otherwise mild face. Riordan was not a tough guy but scholarly by nature, a former teacher of art history and something of a marshmallow, the kind of man who not only gives money to panhandlers but patiently and sympathetically listens to their stories. During his second (and final) year at Notre Dame, he’d joined the boxing club to put some steel in his spongy soul and emulate Sean, the eldest of his four older brothers and his boyhood hero—a Golden Gloves light heavyweight, a marine who’d won a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam. To the amazement of everyone in his large family, including himself, Riordan qualified for the finals in Notre Dame’s Bengal Bouts tournament in 1979. That was when his fine, slim nose met a straight right he never saw coming and his rear end greeted the canvas.

  Riding slowly out of town, returning the waves of parishioners out on the street, he reflected on the things he’d learned in his four years as pastor. Things not taught in the seminary. Some were tutorials in economics—a kilo of uncut cocaine wholesaled in Mexico for around $12,000 and retailed in the United States for twice that—but most were vocabulary lessons. The slang for cocaine was perico, and for marijuana mota. The AK-47 was called a cuerno de chivo, or goat’s horn, for its long, curved magazine. The AR-15, with its black barrel and black plastic stock, was a chanate, after a nickname for a grackle. A sicario was a hit man, the word deriving from Sicarii, the assassins hired by Roman emperors. To kill someone was to darle el piso, give him the floor. A drug boss was sometimes called el jefe—the boss—and sometimes el mero-mero, an untranslatable term that roughly meant “the main man.” He’d also been taught, in a seminar given by César, about the plaza system, the arrangement by which a governor, a senator, a high-ranking cop, or all three licensed a drug boss to traffic in a certain territory in exchange for kickbacks, which were called mordida. The boss was then said to tiene la plaza—hold the plaza.

  He hoped his familiarity with this glossary would be useful in his discussions with Captain Valencia. He didn’t want to come off as a naïf with the street smarts of a five-year-old.

  He dropped his helmet’s visor and bumped across the Río Santa Teresa, dry as an Arabian wadi. Only one road tethered San Patricio to t
he greater world: a two-lane blacktop leading west to Hermosillo, the state capital, where it joined the broad federal highway, Mex 15. The road Riordan was on, called the Mesa Verde, went in the opposite direction, writhing through the foothills toward his destination, the base militar, headquarters for the company of paratroopers commanded by Valencia, as well as for a detachment of the Policía Federal, the famed—or infamous—federales. Beyond the base, it turned to dirt, eventually branching off into a web of jeep tracks that climbed into the Sierra Madre. Some years before Riordan had been assigned to San Patricio, this section had also been unpaved, so ribbed and rutted, he’d been told, that driving it could rattle the fillings out of your teeth. In the dry months, which meant most of the year, it coated cars in a fine, rust-red talcum; during the summer monsoons, it was almost impassable, the surface mud slick as ice. The town fathers had petitioned the state government to pave it. The government promised everything and of course delivered nothing, mostly because the project wasn’t big enough to generate graft in amounts attractive to the politicians.

  The appearance one morning of road graders and bulldozers and asphalt trucks, along with hard-hatted workmen carrying picks and shovels, was therefore regarded as miraculous. Some weeks later, several miles of the old road—from San Patricio to the edge of the Sierra—lay under a foot of bituminous black; a drive that had once taken an hour could now be done dust-free in less than half that time, and your fillings stayed put. It was later learned that the civic improvement had not been a supernatural occurrence: the entire project had been organized and paid for by Joaquín Carrasco, mero-mero of the Sonora Cartel. Your narcotics dollars at work. If anyone in San Patricio had known what Carrasco looked like (there was only one photograph of him, a mug shot taken years ago), a bronze statue would have been commissioned to stand alongside General Obregón’s in the plaza, overlooking the bandstand.

  A quarter mile beyond the town limits, where the Santa Teresa’s east-west course bent sharply southward, three of César’s militiamen, armed with sporting weapons, waved him through a checkpoint. The sandbagged sentry post and the trench line zigzagging from both sides marked San Patricio’s outer defenses and made it look like what it was: a town under siege. From there, the road coiled upward in ever-tightening switchbacks above the riverbed. Riordan’s reactions being no longer what they’d been, he cruised along at a processional speed, thinking about what the Old Priest had said this morning. He supposed it was indicative of Mexico’s distance from God that people were now nostalgic for the time when Carrasco had held the plaza in almost all of Sonora. He was known then as Don Joaquín, as if he were a character out of The Godfather, his underlings as los valientes—the brave ones—though there wasn’t anything particularly valiant about smuggling dope. But Riordan had learned—more tutelage from César—that the plaza system kept organized crime in Sonora on a leash. So did Don Joaquín’s temperament. He was first and foremost a businessman.