Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  The captain asked, “What did you get out of them?,” inclining his head to indicate the pair in the stockade. Suspected narcos, even those seized by the army, were to be interrogated and charged by the Federal Police. The protocol avoided sullying military hands with the measures necessary to persuade detainees that the benefits of squealing outweighed those of silence. In this case, no handoff had been required, as it was the Professor’s men who’d arrested the pair.

  “Not much,” he answered.

  “Not much? You’ve had them for almost two days.”

  “Let’s go outside. It’s like a greenhouse in here.”

  The fresh air felt good, still on the chilly side but warming quickly. Eastward, the Sierra’s crests had already been stripped of snow. The two men sauntered along a crushed-gravel walkway, picketed by cypress trees, Valencia’s hand popping up to his maroon beret to return salutes.

  “You were in police intelligence. You have a reputation as an efficient interrogator,” he said. “Please explain why you got nothing out of them.”

  Valencia’s voice, high and sharp, caused a filmy, greenish curtain to shimmer before the Professor’s eyes. Accustomed to these strange sensory experiences, he was not distracted by them.

  “We got nothing because nothing is all they’ve got,” he said. “In other words, they don’t know shit.”

  “You mean they say they don’t know shit.”

  “I mean they don’t know. They don’t know who told them to start collecting cuota. It’s how La Fraternidad operates. In cells. Each cell knows only what it needs to know.”

  Right then, the burner phone in the Professor’s left pocket vibrated, then stopped. He waited a beat. The phone vibrated and stopped again. On the third ring, he opened it. The message in the caller ID window flashed RESTRICTED before the caller hung up a third time. That was the signal—three times.

  “An important call?” asked Valencia.

  “It can wait.”

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket. They resumed walking and came to the main gate, an electronically operated barrier consisting of close-set vertical steel rails, with surveillance cameras mounted on concrete towers on each side. Combined with the walls and the radio towers rising behind the comandancia, the effect was of a colonial presidio with high-tech upgrades. The two soldiers manning the sentry booth snapped salutes, and Valencia’s hand again went up in a casual movement, as if he were brushing away a fly.

  “What did your priest have to say?” he asked. “Also not much?”

  “He’s not mine.”

  “And certainly not mine.”

  “But he is respected. The townspeople love him.”

  Valencia gave a rueful shake of his head. “My fellow Mexicans amaze me sometimes. How in this century they kiss the asses of these witch doctors. How they lay their hands on statues of saints thinking that will cure them of cancer. Un milagro! A miracle! How they will make pilgrimages, walk in sandals for two hundred kilometers, only to have a witch doctor bless them. One could forgive such idiocy, such superstition, a hundred years ago. But now? It’s disgusting.”

  “So it’s not amazing?”

  “Amazing and disgusting. I am disgusted in my amazement.”

  “I think he’s softening up,” said the Professor. “He didn’t object when I told him that if he knows something to say something, and to encourage his parishioners to do likewise. He did say that they would be more cooperative if you apologized.”

  “That again? Fuck that. I am already ordered to stop disarming the vigilantes. Now I must cooperate with those amateurs. Enough cooperation from me. Let us see some from them.”

  They started back the way they’d come. Pausing beside a SandCat, Valencia complained that he had felt humiliated last week, pleading with a witch doctor, a gringo witch doctor no less, to give him information. To be stuck out here in this wilderness among ignoramuses, pursuing lunatics who worshipped a skeleton, was not a fit occupation for a senior capitán in the elite Parachute Rifle Brigade.

  “Con perdón del capitán,” the Professor said with sham formality, “but you did volunteer for this mission. To avenge your brother?”

  Raúl Valencia, the Nogales correspondent for Proceso magazine, had been assassinated in his car a year ago for his commentaries on the narco wars. He was stopped at a traffic light when a sicario pumped five bullets through the door and into his heart. A card bearing the Brotherhood’s logo was left under one windshield wiper, like a parking ticket.

  “I was ordered here, Inspector,” Valencia said stiffly. “My personal motives have nothing to do with it.”

  “You’ll excuse me, Alberto? I have to return that call.”

  The Professor walked out the compound’s rear entrance and hiked a burro track that wound uphill behind the base. Cell reception was better at the top, though his reason for making the climb had more to do with ensuring privacy. It wouldn’t do for anyone to overhear, especially Valencia. Wouldn’t do at all. He dialed Joaquín’s burner, waited for a ring, and hung up. After doing this twice more, he let the call ring through.

  “Hola,” Joaquín Carrasco said from the most secure of his ranches, high in the San Pedro Mártir mountains, on the Baja Peninsula. It was accessible only by air or by a long, unpaved, tortuous jeep track that would test the nerve of even an off-road Baja racer.

  “Hola. How is your health?”

  “For a man of sixty-two years, excellent. I could not be better. This mountain air, you know. The life of a vaquero, every day on horseback in the open air. My only problem is mental. I am going fucking crazy. So I have not heard from you for a while. Qué está pasando?”

  The Professor apologized; he’d been very busy.

  “Are you guys any closer to getting rid of that son of a whore?”

  “We just got started not even a month ago, Joaquín. Julián is up in the Sierra, he moves around a lot. It’s hard to get a fix on him. We’ve got some ideas where he might be—”

  “A fact would be better than an idea.”

  “Claro.”

  “I am anxious to get the fuck out of here. I’m going crazy, my wife is going crazy, and she is making me crazy. She’s here twenty-four hours a day. I can’t even bring girls in from Mexicali or Tijuana. I ride horses and look at cows. I think I understand now why vaqueros fuck cows.”

  “Sheepherders do that.”

  “Sheepherders fuck cows?”

  “No, they fuck sheep.”

  The Professor pictured Joaquín, whom he hadn’t seen for some time, lounging under the ramada where he liked to eat his breakfast, looking like Ernest Hemingway scaled down to five feet eight, his hair white as foam on a wave, his trim beard the same color. Was he still wearing a beard?

  “Listen, do you know something? The people still talk about you. They still sing corridos about you,” he said to make Joaquín feel better. “You are not forgotten.”

  “Very nice to hear. I am also remembered by the Americans. I would like them to forget me. Why don’t you convince your friends there to convince whoever they need to convince to forget about me?”

  “Which friends?”

  “Are you kidding? In the U.S. Customs, in the DEA.”

  “We’ve been through this,” the Professor said. “I have arrangements with them, but they aren’t my friends. Even if they were, they are not high enough on the totem pole to do you any good.”

  “We have spoken too long, yes?”

  They had, but the Professor remembered an item he’d almost let slip his mind. Carrasco had laundered millions via construction companies throughout Sonora. The Professor asked if he had any money in roofing companies.

  “Sure. Two. What the fuck is this about?”

  “Give me their names. It’s for a good cause. Repairs to a church.”

  “What the hell,” Joaquin said, snorting into the phone. “Maybe God will favor me. Momentito. I’ll get them for you.”

  After he had the names written down, the Profe
ssor dropped the burner, stomped on it, and buried the remains under a rock.

  He started back down the path, thinking about Mexican politics, a complicated and not-so-comic opera. Two years ago, when the PAN—the National Action Party—was still in power, Joaquín Carrasco had been indicted by a U.S. grand jury on multitudinous racketeering charges. The Americans were going to request extradition if he was arrested by Mexican authorities. It was understood that the government would grant the request, because virtually all of Joaquín’s connections were in the opposition party, the PRI—the Institutional Revolutionary Party—which had ruled the country for all but twelve of the last eighty-odd years. Word had come through back channels that the Americans were going to offer Joaquín a reduced sentence or confinement in a facility more pleasant than a maximum security prison, on the condition that he identify the PRI mayors, governors, senators, deputies, and cabinet ministers with whom he’d been in cahoots for three decades. The scandal would rock PAN’s political opponents to the core, which would help PAN win the next general election.

  Joaquín still had PRI friends in high places, but they were in the minority and lacked the clout to protect him. They urged him to flee the country. He went to sea on his two-hundred-foot yacht, the Doña Isabella, sailing as far as Australia on what became an extended fishing voyage. He loved deep-sea fishing. But his organization collapsed during his absence; it was no match for the Brotherhood. His prospects brightened after the elections returned the PRI to full power. The Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, the presidency. A message was flashed to him out on the blue waters: he could come home. Certain rules would apply to his repatriation. He was to keep out of sight, maintain a profile so low he could walk under a termite without mussing his hair.

  The Professor had known little about all this high-level maneuvering until he was summoned to play a role. He had moonlighted for the Sonora Cartel for years; indeed, it was Joaquín who got him a position in the Federal Police; so Grigorio Bonham was the obvious choice to arrange for a civilian helicopter to pluck Joaquín off his yacht and ferry him to wherever he wanted to go. The Professor, however, was not to divulge the destination to anyone. The Americans were certain to discover that Joaquín had returned to Mexico, and to pressure Mexican law enforcement to find him and bust him. It would therefore be best if no one knew his whereabouts, for his PRI associates wished to avoid a dilemma: they could not agree to turn him over to the Americans, but refusing to extradite him would sour their relations with the United States. The simplest way out of that predicament would be to avoid arresting Joaquín, albeit with a plausible excuse. We’re looking for him, but we can’t find him!

  And besides, the powerful, no less than the powerless, wanted him to run things again in Sonora. The Americans would get the drugs they craved; the politicians and cops would prosper on mordida; the common people would be able to come and go without fear; violence would be kept within bounds. No beheadings, no mutilated corpses littering city streets and rural roadsides. The publicly stated mission for Joint Operation Falcon was to rid Sonora of Salazar’s gory chaos; the secret mission, known only to a handful of people (the Professor among them) was to restore Joaquín Carrasco and order. Eventually, it was hoped, the gringos would see that things were better off with him in charge, and the U.S. Department of Justice would lose its zeal to put him behind bars. The Professor had often said it: organized crime was far preferable to disorganized crime.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  He had wiped the vessels with a cloth and packed them in his travel Mass case, each in its place. Chalice. Ciborium. Paten. He’d zipped his vestments into a hanger bag to keep the road dust off it, and with it and the Mass kit in hand, he met Lisette at her clinic. Organized and deliberate, Riordan was annoyed by her rushed, improvisational way of doing things. It tired him to watch her flinging equipment haphazardly into reusable grocery bags—portable ultrasound machine, nebulizer, digital thermometers, disposable syringes—then pulling pill bottles and antibiotic packets from cabinets as indiscriminately as a drug addict burglarizing someone’s medicine chest.

  They lugged the bags outside, dumped them into her Dodge pickup’s rear seat, then dragged a portable plastic bathtub from the courtyard and wedged it into the truck bed between two jerricans (one for water, one for gasoline) and two spare tires, which he fervently hoped would not be needed; both were as bald as Hugo Beltrán’s skull.

  “Four stops before we leave,” she said, climbing in behind the wheel.

  “Couldn’t you have gotten this done yesterday?” Riordan tried but failed not to sound disapproving.

  “No time,” she answered, a little out of breath. Drove Nick and Pamela to Tucson on Sunday, drove herself back Monday, and then had to see patients.

  The twenty-year-old Dodge was her clinic’s back-country vehicle, and it suffered from every off-road mile it had been driven. When she turned the key, a wheezing sound came from under the hood, prompting her to pump the gas pedal. On the third try, the engine caught. Lisette advised him, as she removed a thick silver bracelet from her wrist and turquoise rings from her fingers, to take off his watch.

  “This old thing?” He raised a hand to display his forty-dollar Timex with its cracked leather band.

  “It’ll look like a Rolex up there.”

  “I’ve worn it up there before with no trouble.”

  She tilted her head, an ear halfway to her shoulder. “C’mon, Tim. Humor me, would you?”

  He stashed the Timex in the glove compartment with her jewelry. She popped the clutch, and the Dodge Ram rattled down the cobblestoned street to a tienda de comestibles, where she picked up beans and nixtamal and cans of fruit to pass out as gifts. From the grocery she went to a pharmacy for more antibiotics, from there to the Pemex to top off the tank, from the gas station to the bank for a quick withdrawal at the only ATM in San Patricio—the only one, for that matter, within a radius of about fifty miles.

  Finally, she sped out of town, crossing the Santa Teresa, passing through mesquite and stands of columnar cacti resembling giant spiny pickles. They were stopped briefly at the roadblock, but this time Riordan did not meet with any unpleasantness. The road went past the army base before it turned to dirt and began its hairpinning—and, for Riordan, hair-raising—climb into the high Sierra. They were headed for the aldeas and caserios—the villages and hamlets—in the easternmost part of the municipality, near the Chihuahuan border. Wild country, puma and jaguar country, inhabited by Mayos, Guarijios, and isolated bands of Tarahumaras. Lawless country also, maybe the most dangerous in North America. It had been so for decades—the last renegade Apaches had held out in the Sierra Madre well into the 1930s, and Pancho Villa had eluded General Pershing in its labyrinthine canyons.

  The road twisted up and up, skirting shadowed barrancas. In one ascent, it slanted like a raised drawbridge and appeared to end in midair. Riordan shut his eyes, half-expecting the Dodge to fly into space. Instead, it slid around a switchback and ran along a level stretch, the slope on the right side, steep as a chalet roof, plunging hundreds of feet. The oaks at the canyon bottom, speckled with the pink blossoms of the amapa trees, were reduced to the dimensions of yard plants. Lisette drove twice as fast as he would have dared on his Harley. She hit a pothole without braking, then another. Bang. Crash. Something was bound to fall off the truck at any moment.

  “So who are you marrying?” she asked offhandedly, as if she were on an interstate.

  He didn’t answer. He felt nauseous, his breathing short, his palms damp.

  “Did you hear me, Tim?”

  “I did,” he croaked. “I know you don’t believe in heaven, but you drive like you do. Could you please slow down?”

  “Oh, right. Your acrophobia.”

  She eased up on the gas pedal, but not as much as he wished.

  “What was the question?”

  “Who’s getting married?”

  “A couple in Mesa Verde. They’ve been living together, a kid to show for i
t now, so they sent word that they wanted to make it legal.”

  “Are you going to make them repent first for living in sin?” she wisecracked.

  “I make allowances for Indians.” He let a second or two pass, then threw a barb: “For non-Indians, too.”

  “Ooooooh. Am I supposed to be grateful for your open-mindedness? I was only needling you, y’know.”

  He fluttered a hand in apology, pleading that the near-death experience she was putting him through made him edgy.

  * * *

  They topped out on the mesa from which Mesa Verde derived its name. It was as though they had traveled from Mexico to British Columbia in an hour. Patches of snow lay on pine-shaded hillsides. A vaquero rode by wrapped in a wool blanket, his burro blowing steam, and stove smoke like vaporous serpents rose from a caserio a short distance ahead. The mesa was off every kind of grid—no electricity, no phones, no running water. If it weren’t for a pickup truck parked off the road, Riordan and Lisette might also have traveled from the twenty-first to the eighteenth century.

  The caserio was their first stop before Mesa Verde. There wasn’t much to it: half a dozen rock and adobe shacks, some with verandas sagging on bent poles; a cistern perched on a mound; latrines covered by what looked like discarded shower curtains; and non-eighteenth-century trash everywhere—beer and soda cans, plastic bottles, food wrappers. Though he’d never visited this particular settlement, he’d been to ones like it, and the squalor always dismayed him. It bent his political correctness in the opposite direction, inclining him to see the early missionaries’ unflattering descriptions of Sonoran Indians as largely true.

  Lisette dove right in, laughing and hugging women and girls in long, colorful skirts, her brown curls flouncing and bouncing. With the greetings out of the way, she and Riordan hauled the portable tub out of the pickup and carried it to a hut that would have looked like a jumble of rocks if it had not been roofed, the roof being a blue tarpaulin thrown over interwoven branches. Inside, sunlight spearing through cracks in the walls provided the only light. A mound of filthy sheets and blankets lay in a corner, on a dirt floor smooth and hard as pavement. The room would not have made a decent stable, though it smelled like one. When Lisette poked the mound with a twig and cried, “Yaretzi! Despertarse! Soy yo, Dr. Lisette!” he realized that someone was under it: the woman Lisette had come to bathe, Yaretzi Olivares. She was believed to be one hundred years old—no one could say for sure—and every day of those years had scribed thin, deep lines into her coppery face. She sat up, iron-gray hair tumbling down her back, grinned toothlessly, and immediately began to babble in some incomprehensible Indian patois. Lisette responded in Spanish, telling her it was time to clean her up, Yaretzi protesting that it was too cold. Hace mucho frío. Mucho, mucho. Riordan helped pull the old woman to her feet, then into a walker that Lisette had brought along. Yaretzi had been lying for God knew how long in her own feces and urine.