by Don Winslow
What’s different about it is the quiet. Radios are turned on low, people whisper prayers, talk quietly to their children. There’s no arguing, no pushing or shoving for the small supply of food or water. People wait patiently in line, bring the spare meals to the old and the children, help one another carry water, set up makeshift tents and shelters, dig latrines. Those whose homes weren’t damaged bring blankets, pots and pans, food, clothing.
A woman hands Nora a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt.
“Take these.”
“I couldn’t.”
“It’s getting cold.”
Nora takes the clothing.
“Thank you. Gracias.”
Nora goes behind a tree to change. Clothes never felt so good. The flannel feels wonderful and warm on her skin. She has closets full of clothes at home, she thinks, most of which she’s worn once or twice. She’d give a lot right now for a pair of socks. She’s known that the elevation of the city is more than a mile high, but now she feels it as the night gets cold. She wonders about the people still trapped beneath the buildings, if they can stay warm.
She finishes her tea and bread, then ties her kerchief back on and walks back to the ruins of the hotel. Gets on her knees beside a middle-aged woman and starts to move more rubble.
Parada walks through hell.
Fires burn crazily, rampantly, from broken gas lines. Flames glow from inside the shells of ruined buildings, lighting the Stygian darkness outside. The acrid smoke stings his eyes. Dust fills his nose and mouth and makes him cough. He gags on the smell. The sickening stench of decomposing bodies, the stink of burned flesh. Underneath those sharp smells, the duller but still pungent scent of human feces, as the sewer systems have failed.
It gets worse as he moves along, encounters child after child, wandering, crying for their mothers and fathers. Some of them in just underwear or pajamas, others in full school uniforms. He gathers them up as he goes along. He has a little boy in one arm and he’s holding the hand of a little girl with the other, and she’s holding another child’s hand, who is holding another . . .
By the time he gets to La Alameda Park he has over twenty children with him. He wanders until he finds where Catholic Relief has set up a tent.
Parada finds a monsignor and asks, “Have you seen Antonucci?”
Meaning Cardinal Antonucci, the papal nuncio, the Vatican’s highest representative in Mexico.
“He’s saying Mass at the cathedral.”
“The city doesn’t need a Mass,” Parada says. “It needs power and water. Food, blood and plasma.”
“The spiritual needs of the community—”
“Sí, sí, sí, sí,” Parada says, walking away. He needs to think, to get his head together. There’s so much to be organized, so many people with so many needs. It’s overwhelming. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and starts to light one.
A voice—a woman’s voice—bites out of the darkness. “Put that out. Are you nuts?”
He snuffs the match out. Shines his flashlight and finds the woman’s face. An extraordinarily pretty face, even under all the dust and grime.
“Broken gas lines,” she says. “Do you want to blow us all up?”
“There are fires all over,” he says.
“Then I guess we don’t need another one, huh?”
“No, I suppose not,” Parada says. “You’re American.”
“Yeah.”
“You got here quickly.”
“I was here,” Nora says, “when it happened.”
“Ah.”
He looks her over. Feels the faint ghost of a long-forgotten stirring. The woman is small, but there’s something of the warrior about her. A real chip on her shoulder. She wants to fight, but she doesn’t know what or how.
Like me, he thinks.
He puts a hand out.
“Juan Parada.”
“Nora.”
Just Nora, Parada observes. No last name.
“Do you live in Mexico City, Nora?”
“No, I came down on business.”
“What kind of business are you in?” he asks.
She looks him square in the eye. “I’m a call girl.”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“A prostitute.”
“Ah.”
“What do you do?”
He smiles. “I’m a priest.”
“You’re not dressed like a priest.”
“You’re not dressed like a prostitute,” he says. “Actually, I’m even worse than a priest, I’m a bishop. An archbishop.”
“Is that better than a bishop?”
“If you’re judging solely by rank,” he says. “I was happier as a priest.”
“Then why don’t you go back to being a priest?”
He smiles again, and nods, and says, “I’m going to wager that you’re a very successful call girl.”
“I am,” Nora says. “I’ll bet you’re a very successful archbishop.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of quitting.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure I believe anymore.”
Nora shrugs and says, “Fake it.”
“Fake it?”
“It’s easy,” she says. “I do it all the time.”
“Oh. Ohhhh, I see.” Parada feels himself blushing. “But why should I fake anything?”
“Power,” Nora says. Seeing Parada’s puzzled look, she goes on. “An archbishop must be pretty powerful, right?”
“In some ways.”
Nora nods. “I sleep with a lot of powerful men. I know that when they want something done, it gets done.”
“So?”
“So,” she says, pointing her chin at the park around her, “there’s a lot that needs to get done.”
“Ah.”
From the mouths of babes, Parada thinks. Not to mention prostitutes.
“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” he says. “We should stay in touch.”
“A whore and a bishop?” Nora says.
“Clearly, you’ve never read the Bible,” Parada says. “The New Testament? Mary Magdalene? Ring a bell?”
“No.”
“In any case, it would be all right for us to be friends,” he says, then quickly adds, “I don’t mean that kind of friends, of course. I took a vow . . . I simply mean . . . I would like it if we were friends.”
“I think I’d like that, too.”
He takes a card from his pocket. “When things calm down, would you call me?”
“Yeah, I will.”
“Good. Well, I’d better get going. Things to do.”
“Me, too.”
He walks back to the Catholic Relief tent.
“Start getting these kids’ names,” he orders a priest, “then compare them with the roll of dead, missing, and survivors. Someone somewhere must be keeping a list of parents looking for children. Cross-index their names against that.”
“Who are you?” the priest asks.
“I’m the Archbishop of Guadalajara,” he says. “Now, get moving. And put someone else to getting these children food and blankets.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And I’ll need a car.”
“Your Grace?”
“A car,” Parada says. “I’ll need a car to take me to the nunciate.”
The papal nunciate, Antonucci’s residence, is in the south of the city, far from the most damaged areas. The electricity will be running, the lights on. Most importantly, the phones will be working.
“Many of the streets are blocked, Your Grace.”
“And many of them aren’t,” Parada says. “You’re still standing there. Why?”
Two hours later, Papal Nuncio Cardinal Girolamo Antonucci returns to his residence to find an upset staff and Archbishop Parada in his office, his feet up on the desk, sucking on a cigarette, snapping orders into the telephone.
Parada looks up when Antonucci comes in.
“Can you get us some mor
e coffee?” Parada asks. “It’s going to be a long night.”
And a longer day tomorrow.
Guilty pleasures.
Hot, strong coffee. Fresh warm bread.
And thank God Antonucci is Italian and smokes, Parada thinks as he draws into his lungs that guiltiest of all guilty pleasures, at least among the ones available to a priest.
He exhales the smoke and watches it rise to the ceiling, listening as Antonucci sets his cup down and says to the minister of the interior, “I have spoken to His Holiness personally, and he wishes me to assure the government of his beloved people of Mexico that the Vatican stands ready to offer whatever aid it can, despite the fact that we still do not enjoy formal diplomatic relations with the government of Mexico.”
Antonucci looks like a bird, Parada thinks.
A tiny bird with a small, neat beak.
He was dispatched from Rome eight years ago with the mission of bringing Mexico formally back into the fold after over one hundred years of official government anti-clericism, since the Ley Lerdo of 1856 had seized the vast church-owned haciendas and other lands and sold them off. The revolutionary constitution of 1857 had stripped the power of the Church in Mexico, and the Vatican retaliated by excommunicating any Mexican who took the constitutional oath.
So for a century an uneasy truce has existed between the Vatican and the Mexican government. Formal relations have never been resumed, but not even the most rabid socialists of the PRI—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico in a one-party, pseudo-democratic government since 1917—would try to totally abolish the Church in this land of faithful peasants. So there have been petty harassments such as the ban on clerical garb, but mostly there has been a grudging accommodation between the government and the Vatican.
But it has always been a goal of the Vatican to regain formal status in Mexico, and as a politician from the Church’s arch-conservative wing, Antonucci has lectured Parada and the other bishops that “we must not lose the faithful of Mexico to godless Communism.”
So it’s natural, Parada thinks, that Antonucci would view the earthquake as an opportunity. See the deaths of ten thousand of the faithful as God’s way of bringing the government to its knees.
Necessity will force the government to eat a lot of crow over the next few days; it has yet to humble itself by accepting aid from the Americans, but it will. And it has yet to crawl to the Church for help, but here it is.
And we’ll give them the money.
Money that we’ve collected from the faithful, rich and poor, for centuries. The coin in the collection plate, untaxed, invested at great profit. So now, Parada thinks, we will extract a price from a prostrate country to give it back the money we took from it in the first place.
Christ would weep.
Money changers in the temple?
We are the money changers in the temple.
“You need money,” Antonucci says to the minister. “You need it quickly, and you’re going to have a hard time borrowing it, given your government’s already precarious credit ratings.”
“We’ll issue bonds.”
“Who’ll buy them?” Antonucci asks, a hint of a satisfied sneer playing at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t offer enough interest to tempt investors for that kind of money. You can’t even service, never mind repay, the debts you already have. We should know; we already hold a stack of Mexican paper.”
“Insurance,” the minister says.
“You’re underinsured,” Antonucci says. “Your own Department of the Interior has turned a blind eye to all the hotels’ practice of underinsurance, to encourage tourism. The stores, the apartment buildings—same thing. Even the government ministries that collapsed were grossly underinsured. Or self-insured, I should say, without the funds to back it up. It’s a bit of a scandal, I’m afraid. So while your government might hold the Vatican in official disdain, the financial institutions have a somewhat better opinion of us. I believe it’s referred to in the jargon as 'Triple A.’ ”
Machiavelli could only have been an Italian, Parada thinks.
If it weren’t such a hideously cynical piece of extortion, you’d almost have to admire it.
But there’s too much work to be done, and it’s urgent, so Parada says, “Let’s cut through the shit, shall we? We will gladly bring whatever aid we can, financial and material, on an informal basis. You, in return, will allow our clergy to wear the cross and clearly label any material aid as coming from the Holy Roman Catholic Church. You will guarantee that the next administration, within thirty days of taking office, will commence good-faith negotiations on establishing formal relations between the state and the Church.”
“That’s in 1988,” Antonucci snaps. “Almost three years away.”
“Yes, I did the math,” Parada says. He turns back to the minister. “Do we have a deal?”
Yes, they do.
“Just who do you think you are?” Antonucci asks after the minister leaves. “Don’t you ever supersede me in a negotiation again. I had him on the run.”
“Is that our role now?” Parada asks. “To keep needy people on the run?”
“You do not have the authority to—”
“Am I being taken to the woodshed?” Parada asks. “If so, please be quick about it. I have work to do.”
“You seem to forget that I am your direct superior.”
“You can’t forget what you don’t acknowledge in the first place,” Parada says. “You’re not my superior. You’re a politician sent by Rome to conduct politics.”
Antonucci says, “The earthquake was an act of God—”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“—which provides an opportunity to save the souls of millions of Mexicans.”
“Don’t save their souls!” Parada yells. “Save them!”
“That is sheer heresy!”
“Good!”
It isn’t just the earthquake victims, Parada thinks. It’s the millions living in poverty. The literally countless millions in the slums of Mexico City, the people living on garbage dumps in Tijuana, the landless peasants in Chiapas who are in reality little more than serfs.
“This 'liberation theology’ doesn’t fly with me, “ Antonucci says.
“I don’t care,” Parada says. “I don’t answer to you—I answer to God.”
“I can pick up this phone and have you transferred to a chapel in Tierra del Fuego.”
Parada grabs the phone and hands it to him.
“Do it,” he says. “I’d be very happy being a parish priest at the ends of the earth. Why aren’t you dialing? Shall I do it for you? I’m calling your bluff. I’ll call Rome, and then I’ll call the newspapers to tell them exactly why I’m being transferred.”
He watches little red spots appear on Antonucci’s cheeks. The bird is upset, Parada thinks. I have ruffled his smooth feathers. But Antonucci regains his calm, his placid exterior, even his self-satisfied smile, as he sets down the receiver.
“Good choice,” Parada says with a confidence he doesn’t feel. “I’ll head up this relief effort, I’ll launder the Church’s money so as not to embarrass the government, and I’ll help bring the Church back to Mexico.”
“I’m waiting for the quid,” Antonucci says, “in the pro quo.”
“The Vatican will make me a cardinal.”
Because the power to do good can come only with, well, power.
Antonucci says, “You have become something of a politician yourself.”
It’s true, Parada thinks.
Good.
Fine.
So be it.
“So we have an understanding,” Parada says.
Suddenly he’s become more of a cat than a bird, Parada thinks. Thinking he’s swallowed the canary. That I’ve sold my soul to him for the sake of my ambition. A transaction that he can understand.
Good, let him think it.
Fake it, the lovely Americ
an prostitute had said.