Some Rise by Sin Read online

  “He cut deals, you know, not throats,” César had said. “He didn’t make life harder for people—sometimes he made it easier, like when he paved the road. He preferred to talk than to fight, and if he had to execute someone, that’s who he executed. He didn’t massacre twenty people just to get the guy he was after.”

  César also gave history lessons. In 2006, the country’s new president ordered the military out of its barracks to battle the cartels. He was the new sheriff in town; he was going to clean up the entire country. The unintended consequence was chaos. The campaign splintered the big cartels into smaller ones, and then splintered the splinters. Each little gang fought for its share of the traffic, resulting in something close to a Hobbesian state of nature: a war of all against all. The plaza system fell apart. Here in Sonora, Carrasco lost his protection, and he went into hiding—some said in Guatemala, some said in Spain, and some swore he’d been seen in Costa Rica.

  Leaderless, the Sonora Cartel fragmented, like the others, into warring factions. From the entire state, the territory under its control had shrunk to a few municipalities in the far south, near the border with Sinaloa.

  * * *

  Its ruin spawned La Fraternidad, the Brotherhood. A new thing on the scene, a whole new wrinkle, as much a terrorist organization as it was a mafia. It diversified operations, expanding from drug smuggling into extortion and kidnapping. In the past, you were safe if you weren’t mixed up in the trafficking of dope or migrants; now no one was safe, big or little, rich or poor. Quiroga’s bakery had been squeezed a percentage for every tortilla sold; farmers were “taxed” at harvesttime; and when the Mexican supervisor of a Canadian copper mine nearby refused to fork over for each ton of ore produced, he was murdered, his body dumped in the plaza with the Brotherhood’s calling card pinned to his blood-soaked shirt: the image of La Santa Muerte, Holy Death.

  The gang’s boss was Ernesto Salazar, about whom little was known beyond his name (which was seldom spoken, as if he were a wrathful deity who had forbidden its utterance). Salazar had, in fact, set himself up as a kind of religious figure, authoring his own “bible,” upon which his followers swore allegiance in an induction ceremony rumored to involve the sacrifice of a chicken, goat, or cow.

  Riordan had never seen, much less read, this bible. Father Hugo had, and said that it mixed Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, Caribbean Santería, and Aztec paganism into an incoherent mishmash. Los fraternidarios venerated the traditional saints along with a pantheon of narco “saints,” of whom the highest was the sacred female, Holy Death, represented by a skeleton clad in the Virgin’s robes, clutching a scythe in her fleshless fingers.

  Riordan had been in the parish less than a year the first time he saw her. He’d been summoned to give Last Rites to San Patricio’s police chief, gunned down—on the very road he was traveling now—with two of his officers. The bodies were cold by the time he reached the scene, and he knew the instant he saw it that he would never forget it. The bullet-sieved patrol car. Shards of glass sparkling in ponds of blood. The corpses, which the killers had pulled out of the vehicle, sprawled on the pavement, the chief’s left leg bent under him, a constable with an arm twisted scarf-like around his throat—it was as if death had made them double-jointed. What burned the sight into Riordan’s memory was that each man’s right hand had been lopped off and placed upright on the car’s hood. A playing card with the picture of La Santa Muerte, holding a Kalashnikov instead of a scythe, had been pressed between the thumbs and forefingers. A piece of cardboard was jammed into the crack between the hood and fender, with a quote from Saint Matthew scrawled on it: Y si tu mano derecha te es ocasión de pecar, córtalo y échala de ti. “And if your right hand causes you to offend, cut it off, and cast it from you.”

  Another lesson not in any curriculum he’d ever studied. See what people are capable of when all the guardrails come down.

  The sight transfixed him, but somehow he managed to kneel, anoint each body, and murmur, “Through this holy unction may the Lord pardon you whatever sins and faults you have committed and lead you to eternal life.” No one but God knew when the soul departed the flesh, and if theirs somehow remained in the cold corpses, perhaps the ritual would help speed them to heaven. It did not help Riordan. He felt tainted in his own soul just by being there; it was as if the atrocity had made a sacrilege of the sacrament he’d administered.

  News of the massacre had spread quickly to the most remote parts of the municipality. Rumor had it that the victims had been on Don Joaquín’s payroll and remained loyal to him. That seemed to be their offense.

  A day passed before Riordan could speak of what he’d seen. He’d witnessed bloodshed as a young priest on his first foreign mission in Guatemala, he’d said to Father Hugo, but nothing to compare with this black marriage of murder, mutilation, and sacred Scripture.

  “The fraternidarios, you know, are like the Islamists in the Middle East,” the vicar had told him. “For them, Allah and holy war sanctions whatever they do. For these butchers, it is Holy Death. They pray to La Santa Muerte for everything because she justifies everything. She is the deification of death, the baptizing of murder.”

  That didn’t help, either.

  * * *

  Riordan rode on. The country between the militia checkpoint behind him and the military compound ahead was a kind of no-man’s-land, but the road was firmly under army and police control and safe to travel. Even without that protection, he would not have to worry about his own security. So far, La Fraternidad had not targeted priests for extortion or kidnapping. The exemption probably had nothing to do with respect for the clergy; a priest, a Franciscan friar in particular, wouldn’t fetch much of a ransom. As for extorting him, he couldn’t cough up more than a few pesos from the collection box.

  He came to the stretch where the road switchbacked between two rocky cliffs streaked with bright green lichen. One rose on the left side to a fissured pinnacle; the other, no more slope to it than the side of a building, plunged three hundred feet into the boulder-cobbled bed of the Santa Teresa. He could see the chasm in his peripheral vision and throttled down to five miles an hour, his palms sweaty on the handles, his gut turning somersaults. As he approached the switchback’s apex, a line of highway cones shunted him to the left—a military roadblock. A beige army troop carrier—a SandCat—was parked on a turnout barely two yards from the precipice. Three soldiers sat atop it, behind a machine gun protruding from its roof like a lethal ornament. Another soldier was in the cab.

  A fifth, standing sentry beside the cones, signaled Riordan to stop with a swing of his rifle. Riordan dismounted, raised his visor, and took off his helmet so the soldier would see his gray hair and pale gringo face and not think him a narco.

  “Mexican citizen?” the sentry asked, his accent, like his mahogany complexion, identifying him as an Indian from the far south of the country. He was squat and bowlegged, his chest half as wide as he was tall; his shoulders began right below his ears, and his forehead slanted above close-set eyes into a maroon paratrooper’s beret, set off by a silver emblem of an open parachute pierced by a lightning bolt. Riordan explained that he was an American missionary priest, the pastor in San Patricio.

  The soldier told him to wait and conferred with the comrade seated at the steering wheel. In the middle of the road, attempting to appear unconcerned, Riordan unzipped his jacket—the day had warmed twenty degrees since morning—dropped the kickstand, and leaned against the bike while looking back in the direction from which he’d come. The road appeared and disappeared, unraveling downhill to the Santa Teresa valley, fractured by the sandy riverbed and fringed with alamo trees. San Patricio sprawled along the west side, rusted tin and tile roofs crowded around the central plaza and the church, whose domed bell towers loomed over all. Farther off, under a haze, the copper mine’s tailings rose like the wall of a giant meteor crater. Looking in the other direction presented junipers, oaks, and thorn-bush scrub speckling a wide bajada that
sloped down from the pine-darkened Sierra Madre, the Brotherhood’s stronghold. Beautiful country that might have been designed by a fiendish landscape architect, everything in it created to bite, scratch, sting, or claw: scorpions burrowed in the dirt; rattlesnakes coiled in the rocks; pumas and the occasional jaguar prowled the mountains; the fishhook barbs of barrel cactus waited, with infinite patience, to draw blood.

  “Ohe! Padre! Ven aca!”

  Riordan turned toward the voice. It came from the soldier who’d been inside the SandCat and was now outside, beside his shorter comrade. A sergeant. Judging from his peremptory tone, he was in command. A quiver rippled through Riordan’s knees. To obey the order, he would have to go to where the two men were standing, very near the cliff’s edge.

  “Hey, you! I said come here!”

  He forced himself to move until he was a few feet from the sergeant, who looked skeptically at Riordan’s ashen face, sparkling with sweat.

  “What makes you so nervous?”

  “Nothing … I … It’s become warm, and…”

  “My soldado says you say you are a priest. You don’t look like no priest to me.”

  He hadn’t thought that his unclerical mode of dress would cause suspicion. “Well, I am.”

  “Identification,” the sergeant said, fluttering his fingers.

  Riordan produced his Mexican driver’s license and U.S. passport. Both showed him in a Roman collar. The sergeant gave the documents a cursory glance, and Riordan a longer, more appraising look.

  “I’ve never seen a priest riding a motorcycle. Where are you going on that motorcycle?”

  “To see your commanding officer.”

  “My commanding officer? For what purpose?”

  “It’s complicated…”

  “This is simple.”

  The sergeant clutched his arm, spun him around, and shoved him against the front end of the troop carrier, ordering him to spread his legs and keep his hands flat on the grille at arm’s length. He beat back an impulse to resist. While he was patted down, the other paratroopers hovered around Negra Modelo, muttering in admiration while they searched the bike’s saddlebags. The short private reported that it was clean.

  The sergeant climbed back into the SandCat and spoke into a radio in military gibberish. Another voice answered, but Riordan couldn’t make out what it said. Swinging the door open, the sergeant ordered him to lie facedown on the ground, hands behind his head.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “This is outrageous.”

  “The capitán’s orders.”

  A poke from the squat soldier’s rifle convinced him that further protest would be useless and possibly hazardous. The thought that he was going to be arrested, or worse, flitted into his brain; he evicted it as too absurd to permit tenancy for longer than a second. He knew how to behave. Comply. Submit. Keep your mouth shut. He’d been in this position before—the actual physical position—in Guatemala. He’d been a young hothead then, preaching liberationist theology, and after he’d made some incendiary public remarks about land reform and justice for his Indian flock, the police had decided to scare him, throwing him down, jabbing his spine and ribs with gun muzzles.

  With his hands clasped over the back of his neck, he could not read his watch, so he didn’t know how long he lay on the gravel. Long enough to feel each and every stone jabbing his thighs, his abdomen, his forehead, his elbows. When he rolled onto his side for relief, the private nudged him with a boot and grunted, “No moving.”

  He heard an automobile pull up, the engine shut down, and the sergeant’s voice again:

  “Get up.” His tone was flat, bored, as if Riordan’s easy submission made him unworthy even of contempt.

  He stood, brushed himself off, and, struggling to suppress his anger, turned to face two men, both about the same height as he, one a güero—a blond, light-skinned Mexican—dressed in civilian clothes, the other in a desert-tan field uniform, the three bars on his collar tips declaring him to be a capitán primero.

  “You are Capitán Valencia?” Riordan asked, extending a hand.

  The officer, without accepting it, answered with a quick nod and said, “Y tú?,” stressing the informal tu instead of the more respectful usted. He glanced down at Riordan’s cowboy boots, up at his biker’s jacket. “You are a priest?”

  “I think of myself as a sinner in need of redemption.”

  Valencia chuckled mirthlessly. He had the slightly underfed look of a long-distance runner, a complexion almost as pale as the güero’s, a long, narrow nose, cheekbones that made sharp ledges under gray, intelligent eyes. Take off the beret and put a crested helmet on his head and you’d have the portrait of a sixteenth-century conquistador. “What do you want to see me about?”

  “Do you mind if we talk on the other side?”

  “The other side of what?”

  “The road.”

  “There is something wrong with this side?”

  “We’re too close to…” Riordan pointed at the drop-off, a pace or two away. “I’m not … well, it’s like this: I’m not comfortable here. I’m afraid of heights.”

  This drew more humorless laughter from Valencia. “There are so many things to fear in these mountains, heights should be the least of them.”

  They crossed the road, Riordan worrying that he’d already screwed things up, making himself ridiculous. The captain and the güero leaned against their car, a dark blue SUV with the words “POLICÍA FEDERAL” on its door. The güero wasn’t a civilian: as he folded his arms, his windbreaker parted, exposing a holstered pistol and a federale badge pinned to his belt.

  “If you’re now comfortable,” Valencia said, not without sarcasm, “tell me what you want to see me about.”

  Riordan fought down the temptation to come out swinging with objections to his treatment. “I didn’t mean to inconvenience you, Captain. I had every intention of speaking with you at the base.”

  “You are not inconveniencing me. I’m here because of my intentions. I don’t want you or any other unauthorized person setting foot on the base.”

  “You have made yourself clear.”

  “Do the same for yourself.”

  Despite the request, Riordan sensed that an oblique approach would be more appropriate, and he attempted one with a speech about common interests: Valencia’s paratroopers and San Patricio’s autodefensa had the same mission: to liberate the municipality from La Fraternidad’s terror. It made sense, did it not, for the two to act in concert rather than against each other? The militiamen were shocked and angered when the soldiers moved in to take their weapons from them. Such pitiful weapons, too. Antiquated shotguns, .22-caliber rifles. And so the citizens demonstrated, they resisted, and now two young men who’d had nothing to do with it were dead, and—

  “Listen, priest,” Valencia interrupted, scowling. “Nothing would have happened if these citizens of yours had turned in their guns when I told them to. My orders came from the very top. All these vigilante bands in the country are to be disarmed, and you know why.”

  Riordan knew what the government claimed: there had been enough bloodshed without mobs of untrained civilians getting into firefights with the far better armed cartels. The real reason, most people thought, was to take the pitchforks from the peasants, just in case they got it into their heads that drug gangs were only part of their problem and decided to storm the castles of corrupt political power instead. That is, prevent a revolution before it got started. The country was ripe for one. The richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, was a Mexican citizen; Riordan didn’t doubt that so was the world’s poorest man.

  “Still, it was a peaceful demonstration,” he said to Valencia. “My parishioners feel that there was no provocation for your men to open fire.”

  “Peaceful? There was nothing peaceful about it!” The army officer pushed himself forward and brought his face to within inches of Riordan’s. His breath was stale with the smell of tobacco. “One of y
our parishioners fired a shot before my men opened fire.”

  “The way I heard it, a soldier accidentally discharged his rifle, and that panicked some others into shooting.”

  “Don’t argue with me! Panic? My troops don’t panic. They showed great discipline, shooting into the air!” Valencia’s pale cheeks reddened, not out of anger but, rather, embarrassment. A man who treasured restraint, Riordan judged, ashamed whenever he lost it. The captain collected himself. “I’m still waiting for you to make yourself clear.”

  “The people in town want to collaborate with the army,” Riordan said. “I’ve been asked to ask you to make an apology, if you want their cooperation.”

  He spoke rapidly, almost incomprehensibly, like a voice-over in a prescription drug commercial, rattling off the remedy’s unpleasant side effects. One look into that spare, stern Castilian face told him that its owner would sooner commit an obscene act in public than apologize.

  “All I need to do is to go before them crying, Lo siento, lo siento?” the captain said, scorn in every syllable. “And then what? The autodefensistas will peaceably turn in their weapons?”