Some Rise by Sin Page 4

  “I think they would like to fight alongside you, like an auxiliary militia,” he replied.

  Valencia said nothing. Riordan took his silence as encouragement to go on. People in small towns like San Patricio had been forced to protect themselves because they could not rely on the authorities to protect them, he said. There was one exception—

  Valencia interrupted. “You approve of vigilantes?”

  Riordan took a moment before answering with a brief speech: He did not approve, but he understood why people had taken up arms in their own defense. And, he added, he regarded the rise of autodefensas as a good sign that ordinary Mexicans were undergoing a change of heart. For far too long, they had carried on a love affair with their outlaws, romanticizing them as insurgent heroes, singing about them in corridos. All that nonsense about los valientes dying with their rifles in their hands. Now they were beginning to see the brave ones for what they were: thugs and psychopaths.

  “Their eyes have been opened? Only someone who believes in Virgin births could believe that,” Valencia said.

  “I don’t respond to insults, Captain. I was going to say that there is one exception, and that is the army. People feel they can trust the army. The army is respected—”

  “Don’t try to flatter me.”

  “I wasn’t. People will be more willing to give you information if they feel that the army isn’t also their enemy.”

  “Who put you up to this?”

  “No one.”

  “It’s easy enough to guess who. César Díaz didn’t have the balls to come to me himself, so he sends a priest to be his messenger boy. Or would you prefer to be called an ambassador?”

  Riordan said nothing.

  “I have no liking for priests.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “It’s a tradition in my family. My grandfather’s father was with los quemasantos in the twenties. Except he did not burn statues of saints. He burned priests. He put them in jail. He shot them. He hanged them.” Valencia embraced Riordan with a smile as insincere as it was bright. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do any of that to you.”

  “I am very much relieved,” Riordan said, offering an equally insincere bow of gratitude.

  “This father of my grandfather wanted to free Mexico from black magic. He wanted to break the power of the church. He believed in the power of the state. So do I.” Valencia’s gray eyes grew shiny as new coins. He was relishing the opportunity to share his views on these matters, whether or not he’d been asked for them. “For example, a little while ago, on my orders, you were made to lie down in the dirt. Do you think that if your bishop commanded me to lie with my face in the dirt, I would have obeyed?”

  “All right, I get it,” Riordan said. “You don’t genuflect to the church.”

  “Listen, priest. The government has deployed the army to fight these fucking narcos because only the army has the power to do it. With the assistance of the Federal Police, of course.” He threw a little head twitch at his companion. “Why were we sent here? To smash the Brotherhood. To bring Ernesto Salazar out of these mountains in irons or in a body bag. Who but us can do that? You with your rosary beads? A mob of civilians armed with rusty rabbit guns?”

  During this oration, Riordan had become aware that the police officer was studying him much as an artist would a model, only his gaze wasn’t tracing the lineaments of his face. It was more like a probe of his interior, and it made him squirm.

  “Please listen, Captain,” he said. “With those rusty rabbit guns, the autodefensa kicked the Brotherhood out of town.”

  “Not entirely,” Valencia scoffed. “Salazar still has operatives in the town, doesn’t he? Spies?”

  “Yes…”

  “And as for the rest of the municipality, he controls it all. More than one hundred and fifty little villages. The mountains, the poppy fields, the mota farms, he controls them. And that copper mine, they pay him to stay in business. A copper mine!”

  Riordan acknowledged that this, too, was true.

  “Con su perdón, Capitán. That is my point. The militia secures the town, giving your men freedom to operate in the countryside—”

  “Are you going to lecture me on military tactics?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “In my opinion, your rabbit shooters did not force them out. Your pueblo is free of the Brotherhood because Salazar doesn’t need it.”

  The federale then broke his silence: “What is it you want, Father Riordan? Besides an apology from Captain Valencia, that is.”

  Riordan was pleased to be addressed by his name and title rather than as “priest,” as if he were an anonymous member of a separate species. He was also amazed to hear the question put to him in an English as American as his birthplace, Oak Park, Illinois.

  “And you are…?” he asked.

  “A sinner beyond redemption,” the federale replied, with a half smile. Gray stippled his blond hair. Riordan pegged him to be in his late forties. He was handsome in an unremarkable way, with a pleasing face you would forget two minutes after seeing it—except for the piercing, pale blue eyes.

  “No one is ever beyond redemption,” Riordan said. “Although Hitler and Stalin may have been exceptions to the rule. You sound like you’ve spent a lot of time in the States.”

  “It doesn’t matter where I’ve spent my time. No more than it matters who I am. You can call me Professor if you like. Most people do.”

  “Professor of what?”

  “Arts.”

  “Something tells me not to ask what those are.”

  “Whatever voice that is, listen to it. What do you want besides an apology from Captain Valencia?” the cop repeated, continuing to subject Riordan to intense scrutiny. This was what he imagined: with the power of that stare, the Professor had thrust an invisible endoscope into his brain, and it was making images of his thoughts. “I’ll give you a hint. Libera nos a malo.”

  A Mexican federal agent who looked Dutch, spoke perfect American English, and knew church Latin? This produced a disagreeable sensation like the one Riordan had felt as a child when he was wading in the lake near his parents’ summer cottage in Wisconsin and the sand had crumbled underfoot and suddenly he was in greenish depths with no bottom in sight. It was like that—a panicky foundering.

  “You didn’t come to us for an apology,” the Professor went on. “You aren’t anyone’s messenger or ambassador. You came for your own reasons. You want to deliver your parish from the Brotherhood. Salazar is a cult leader as much as he’s a gangster. He extorts money from the copper mine. What he means to extort from you are souls, and you, Padre Tim, can’t allow that to happen.”

  For reasons he couldn’t identify, Riordan found this observation unsettling. “Well, I … I never thought of…” he stammered. “I certainly wouldn’t want him to…”

  “What you want is what we want. We should be working together.”

  Recovering, Riordan pointed out that he’d said that very thing a minute ago.

  “Por supuesto!” Valencia said. Apparently, he’d had no trouble following the English conversation, but now they were back to Spanish. “However, you were speaking of cooperation between the army”—his arm swept wide to take in the soldiers on the SandCat—“and your idiot vigilantes. We”—the arm made a shorter swing between him and the Professor—“are talking about you cooperating with us.”

  “No matter your dislike of priests?”

  “I am a professional soldier. I don’t allow my prejudices to interfere with what needs to be done. There are people, many people, in your parish who work for the Brotherhood.”

  “Most because they were forced into it. It’s the old question: Plata o plomo?”

  “And for some, there was enough silver offered not to require the threat of lead, true?”

  “I suppose, yes.”

  Then, from the Professor: “You hear things, don’t you, Father Riordan?”

  “I hear a great many things.” />
  “Some true, some not.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. People are afraid of their own neighbors these days. Is Pablo with the Brotherhood? Is Miguel? Who knows? There is no trust any longer. People make up stories. Most of the time, they don’t say anything. The whole municipality has become one big casa silencio.”

  Valencia nodded solemnly. “But there is one place where they do say things, and the things they say are not made up.” A glance passed between him and his companion. It looked to Riordan like a prompt. “The narcos are also in need of redemption. Even the worst of them hopes for a ticket into heaven. And you are the man in the ticket booth.”

  “Ego te absolvo tuam peccatorum, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” The Professor, his expression a grimace or a grin or a fusion of both, drew the sign of the cross in the air.

  The day had advanced to midafternoon, the sun rolling down a sky without clouds or even the possibility of clouds. The clarity of vacancy but a clarity for all that. The sobs of widows and mothers had been among the many things Riordan had heard; likewise, every now and then, the confessions of the men who’d murdered their husbands and sons.

  “We need precise information,” Valencia said. “Who did what when. Who has been ordered to do what by whom. We have our dedos, of course we do. But everybody knows that the best evidence is a confession.”

  Dedo. Finger, Riordan thought, recalling more underworld vocabulary. It was clear, from the way the two men were tag-teaming him, that this proposition wasn’t an inspiration of the moment; they had discussed it before.

  He said, “You know I could never do what you’re asking.”

  “To know that a crime has been committed and say nothing makes one an accessory after the fact.” The cop who called himself a professor sounded as if he were lecturing in a law school. “And to know that a crime will be committed and say nothing makes one an accomplice.”

  Dedo. Finger. Snitch. “The seal is inviolate,” Riordan said.

  “But there are circumstances when—”

  “No circumstances, Captain. It is absolutely inviolate.”

  “Is it truly? What about altar boys’ assholes? They should be inviolate, but you priests violate them all the time.”

  Riordan stood with his head bent and turned slightly aside, like someone hard of hearing. He felt a most un-Christian impulse to dig a left hook into the captain’s liver.

  The Professor gave Valencia a disapproving look. “My colleague shouldn’t have made that remark,” he said, reverting again to English.

  “All the same, he did,” Riordan replied. He lifted his glance to the hillside above the car. Swales of sharp, brown grass broken by ocotillo wands, each like a spiked whip, trembled in breezes eddying down from the heights. He turned to the captain. “I buried those boys two days ago. I consoled their mothers, but there is no consolation. No remedy for the pain of outliving your own child. What is being asked of you is very simple. A simple apology that will restore goodwill, and then, I think, you could hear all the secrets you need.”

  Valencia abruptly spun on his heels and reached into the SUV for his cigarettes. He shook one out of the pack and lit it, gazing sternly into Riordan’s face. “What’s being asked of you,” he said, each word producing a puff of smoke, “is likewise very simple.”

  The Professor slouched against the driver’s door. “That would be the quid for the quo.”

  Riordan no longer felt out of his depth; he’d kicked himself back into the shallows, and his feet touched bottom. “Your Latin is a little rusty. It’s ego te absolvo peccatis tuis. I absolve you from your sins. Not of. Requires the ablative.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  He rolled the Harley into the gated courtyard and locked the fork to the veranda post. The Old Priest was tending his herb garden: medicinal herbs mostly, ancient cures for arthritis, bellyaches, cuts and bruises and chafes. He was retired, no longer said Mass, the frequent genuflections too much for his creaky joints. All he did was pray, study rare texts in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and see to his garden, a life of monkish quietude that Riordan sometimes envied.

  “There you have a sign of the times,” Riordan said, sitting on a bench beside the bust of Father Eusebio Kino, motioning at the bike at the same time. “I have to lock it, even here, in a church rectory.”

  Clipping leaves from some plant or other, the Old Priest did not acknowledge him.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, and my question is, Is Mexico far from God or God from her? Has He distanced himself because she has turned her back on Him to become the number one exporter of poison?”

  The Old Priest faced him and pointed at an ear with his clippers to indicate that he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. “Cómo? Qué dijiste?”

  “No importa,” Riordan shouted.

  “As you wish,” said the Old Priest and, bending down in slow motion, returned to his task.

  No longer said Mass. No longer heard confessions; even with the hearing aid, he could not make out the murmured transgressions well enough to grant absolution and assign the proper penances.

  Ego te absolvo … Riordan reflected on Valencia’s and the Professor’s request, if it could be called that. Not the first time it had been made of him.

  The plaintiffs’ attorney was, as Riordan had been then, a redhead. She lacked the quick temper commonly associated with that hair color, simmering instead with a free-floating anger that had found an object in the person of Father Timothy Riordan, whom she was deposing in a class-action lawsuit: John Doe et al., plaintiffs, v. Franciscan Friars of California. Among the John Does was Luis Gonzalez.

  After establishing that Riordan had taught at St. Michael’s high school in Los Angeles with a defendant named Father James Brenner, she asked if Brenner had admitted to Riordan that he’d had sex with underage boys.

  —I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to answer.

  —Are you saying that Father Brenner confessed to having sex with minors but you are bound not to reveal what he said?

  From the defense counsel: Objection. Leading.

  —Sustained. Counsel will rephrase.

  —All right.

  Then she fired a surprise from her quiver of legal arrows. Did you ever hear a cleric, any cleric, confess to having sex with a minor?

  —Objection.

  —Did you ever hear a minor confess to sexual relations with a cleric?

  —Objection!

  —Your Honor, I’m not asking the witness to identify anyone; I’m not asking him to reveal the specific contents of any confession he’s heard. I’m merely asking him to confirm or deny a fact.

  —Objection! Plaintiffs’ counsel is on a fishing expedition. What business does this or any court have in knowing this fact?

  —Overruled. The witness may answer.

  Riordan sat mute, his mind spinning. Did she know? But how? She could have learned only from Brenner himself, but it was very unlikely that he had told her. Still, he might have. Would a denial then bring a charge of perjury? Would the truth open the door to a line of questioning that would lead him into violating his vows? Who and what did he wish to protect? The Franciscan Friars from financial penalties? No. Father Brenner? Absolutely no. The sanctity of the confessional? Yes, but what was more, he wanted to protect one Luis Gonzalez, though Luis didn’t deserve it. The lawyer stood glaring at him.

  —Please answer the question.

  —No, he replied. I never heard any such confession.

  No. Even now, nearly a decade later and in another country, he felt the heat of shame rise in his face.

  The Old Priest rose from his labors. It took him a few seconds to stand up straight. He held what looked like beets in a freezer bag.

  “Qué es eso?” Riordan asked, again shouting to make himself heard.

  “Chicamilla. For the constipation. Señora Villarreal has the constipation.”

  His huaraches shuffling in the dust, the Old Priest went inside to boil the root, carryi
ng on in the tradition of the priest as physician, healer of body and soul, a curandero. There was a quality of the eternal about him; he served no purpose in the parish and yet seemed a permanent part of it, like the antique iron rings on the church doors.

  Riordan, left alone, studied Father Kino’s bust, worn by time and weather, the chips and black streaks on the great Jesuit’s face a reproach. The small monument had been on his restoration to-do list; he’d found a sculptor in Tubac, on the Arizona side, who could make the repairs; but the man had been frightened off by the State Department’s travel advisories, the signs at the border crossings: DANGER! ACTIVE DRUG AND HUMAN SMUGGLING AREA. VISITORS MAY ENCOUNTER ARMED CRIMINALS AND SMUGGLING VEHICLES TRAVELING AT HIGH SPEED.

  Despite the skepticism in which he held Jesuits as a religious order—too arrogant, too proud of their supposed braininess—he much admired Kino. Kino the missionary who’d ridden the Pimería Alta’s river valleys on horseback, a Johnny Appleseed of the faith, planting missions wherever he went, two dozen in twenty years. He’d established this one, the southernmost in his realm, in 1697. La Misión de la Santa Teresa de las Colinas it was called for a century and a half, till the name was changed to San Patricio, honoring the Irish soldiers who deserted the American army to fight for Mexico in 1848. (Leave it to the Irish to join the losing team, Riordan thought. We have a fatal attraction to hopeless causes.) He’d made a pilgrimage to Kino’s tomb in Magdalena, peered down through the glass at his bones in the gray-brown dust. No question that a considerable brain had once filled that long-empty skull. Kino the astronomer who’d written an essay on his observations of a comet. Kino the cartographer who’d mapped the Pimería Alta when it lay beyond the rim of the then known world. And Kino the shepherd, protecting his Indian converts—Pima, Maricopa, Mayo, Tohono O’odham—from the hard Spaniards who enslaved them to wrest silver and gold from the Sierra Madre.

  We live in a nation of sheep and wolves. That line jumped into his mind. He’d read it in a petition published in a newspaper a few months ago. “An Appeal to the People of Mexico,” it was titled. The conquistadores had been the wolves of Kino’s day. The wolves of the present were the narcos, the crooked cops, the corrupt politicians, and the sheep were everyone else. Right then, it came to him that the Professor’s observation had been unsettling for its accuracy. How could a stranger have read him so perfectly when he had not been able to read himself? He did want to deliver his parish from the evil befalling it. More than a desire, it was a sacred obligation, for he was the shepherd, God his master, and the shepherd must answer to the master for the safety of his sheep.