Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  Yes, Riordan said, he would speak to Danielo, but only if Danny came to him.

  “I thank you,” García said, enveloping Riordan’s hand in his.

  * * *

  He never expected to see Danielo, and so he was caught off balance when García’s son showed up the next afternoon at the parish office, breaking Riordan’s concentration—he was working on his sermon, revising, polishing, imposing order and clarity on the semicoherent sentences.

  Danielo was built like Jamie, and an inch taller; his body communicated irresistible leverage. He was got up like a well-off young ranchero in a beaverskin Stetson, a suede jacket over a white shirt, starched Levi’s with a crease that could slice butter, quilled boots polished to a high gloss.

  “My father wants me to see you. I respect him, so here I am,” he said, smirking, hooking his thumbs into his tooled leather belt.

  “That isn’t what I heard,” Riordan said, annoyed by Danielo’s cocksure manner.

  “What did you hear? From who?”

  “From him. That every time he tries to talk to you there’s an argument.”

  “I promise not to argue with you,” he said.

  Surrendering all hope of resuming work, Riordan invited him to have a seat.

  “Not here,” Danielo said. “I don’t want to talk here.”

  “Where would you find suitable?” asked Riordan, unable to keep a caustic note out of his voice.

  “Would it be all right if we rode around in my truck?” Danielo said, now with more civility.

  “Your truck … Where…?”

  “Just ride around.”

  Something to hide, Riordan thought.

  “All right, but no more than half an hour.”

  It was a flame-red Chevy Silverado with a ton of chrome, and Danielo, like any twenty-one-year-old, was proud of it. They cruised through the pueblo for a while, Danny bragging about the Chevy: the big engine, the extended crew cab, the radio with Bose speakers, the GPS—

  “I don’t think your father expects me to talk cars with you,” Riordan said to end the monologue.

  “Okay. I guess you should start, Padre, because I’m not sure what he wants me and you to talk about.”

  “He’s worried that you might be using drugs.”

  “Then this will be a short talk. I don’t do drugs. Never use product—that’s what I’ve been told.”

  Riordan recognized that phrase, the professional narco’s rule of thumb.

  “It’s ‘product’ to you. So you’re selling the stuff?”

  “I don’t sell drugs,” Danielo answered, sounding rather pleased.

  “Another thing on your father’s mind is where you got the money for a truck like this. I’m not interrogating you, but do you mind telling me?”

  “I don’t sell drugs,” he repeated, driving along slowly, casually resting the wrist of one hand on the wheel. “But maybe you’re getting warm.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Danielo shrugged.

  “A truck like this must cost two hundred thousand pesos—”

  “Tres,” Danielo said smugly.

  “Trescientos mil! On a miner’s salary?”

  “I’m not a miner, Padre Tim. I’ll show you.”

  At a traffic circle, Danielo turned down a street that soon became the dirt road leading out of town toward the copper mine. After a mile or so, he stopped on a rise overlooking a huge wound in the earth from which pale dust rose in tendrils, like steam from a volcanic crater.

  “What are we doing out here?” Riordan asked.

  Danielo replied with his own question: “Do you know who owns that?”

  “A Canadian company, Reliance Resources.”

  “They’re part owners. I don’t work for them. I don’t work in the mine. I work for the partners.”

  “I see. And who are these partners and what do you do for them?”

  “Anything you say to a priest is a secret, is that right?”

  “Anything said in confession, yes.”

  Danielo switched the engine off and put the parking brake on and turned toward Riordan.

  “Okay, then. I want to make a confession.”

  “Confessions are on Friday afternoons at four. If you came to church now and then, you would know that.”

  Too sharp, Riordan chided himself.

  “Sure. But I’d like to confess now, here,” said Danielo. “I’d like to go to Communion tomorrow. My father, you know, he goes every Sunday, and he wants all of us to go with him because it’s almost Christmas. I think that’s why he wanted me to talk to you.”

  His manner and tone had passed rather quickly—too quickly, it seemed—from cocky and flippant to earnest and reasonable.

  “If you’re not sincere about it, it won’t be valid,” Riordan said.

  “Didn’t I say I was?”

  This would be another first for Riordan: hearing a confession in a pickup truck. He had an inkling that Danielo might be manipulating him, but there was no way to refuse him. He removed his purple stole from his pocket and draped it over his neck to make things look proper. They went through the ritual right there in the Chevy Silverado, Danielo admitting that he’d missed Mass for at least a year of Sundays, that he’d had premarital sex—he couldn’t recall how many times, but a lot—that he’d fought with his father, dishonoring him, oh, it must have been on three or four occasions, but swearing, all the while looking into Riordan’s eyes with a straightforward expression, that he’d never killed anyone, never touched a bale of mota or a brick of heroin.

  “Danny, you don’t have to confess to what you did not do,” Riordan said, thinking that Danielo was angling to be excused from some as yet unconfessed trespasses. “Is there anything else?” he inquired.

  “Like what?”

  “Like what you do for these people you call ‘the partners.’”

  Shifting his gaze from Riordan’s face, Danielo looked thoughtfully out the windshield.

  “I … you know … I hurt a couple of people for them. Not real bad. I beat them up a little. They hired me because of my size and because I do some boxing.”

  “So did I when I was young—boxed, that is. Go on. Why did you beat them up?’

  “The rule is this: If somebody screws up, like steals or something, they get a warning first. The second time, they get beat up. The third time … you know.”

  “I know, sure. But you swore to me that you’ve never killed anybody.”

  “I swear it a second time.”

  “You’re forcing me to pull things out of you. Are you sorry for what you did? Do you still beat people up for these partners?”

  “No!” Danielo replied. “I’ve been promoted. I’m like an executive who keeps the accounts settled. The mine owes the partners so much per ton of ore per week.”

  “Who are the partners? The Brotherhood?”

  “The partners are the partners. All I do for them is check up on production and make sure the mine doesn’t cheat. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”

  “Then let me help you see. It’s called extortion,” Riordan said, pouring judgment into the word. “Extortion would fall under the Seventh Commandment. Every week, you’re stealing.”

  “That’s what you call it,” Danielo said, turning sullen.

  “A mine foreman was murdered a while back for refusing to pay.”

  “I wasn’t involved in that. How many times do I have to tell you that I never did anything like that?”

  “Some other people have had to pay cuota. Do you collect from them, too?”

  “The mine, that’s all I do. It brings in a lot of money.”

  At a meeting last year of the diocesan priests, the assembled clerics had discussed what they should do, what they could do about the narcos. You must try to change their interior life, the bishop advised. You must try to change their values. Think of Christ entering the house of Zacchaeus. Appropriate in this case, Riordan thought. Zacchaeus had been a tax collector, a
nd in a sense, so was Danielo. But the bishop’s counsel seemed abstract and even silly now, as he sat in the shiny Silverado beside the young criminal. How was he to change Danielo García’s values?

  He said, “You know that to belong to a mafia is a sin. Anyone mixed up with those people cannot go to Communion.”

  “I do what I do because I have to,” Danielo said, a plea in his voice expressing, if not contrition, then something like regret. “Come by our house. New furniture. I bought it. A new TV. I bought it. We don’t have to eat beans and rice every day because we can afford chicken, pork, steak. I’m not going to be like my father, picking fruit for pesos.”

  I could hear the same argument from some punk dealer on the South Side of Chicago, Riordan thought.

  “You must get out,” he said. “If you care at all about your soul, you’ve got to find a way out.”

  Danielo’s lips curled in scorn. “You don’t quit those people—you know that.”

  “This truck, the TV, the steaks—maybe that’s what you don’t want to quit.”

  “I would if I could. I’m telling you the truth, Padre Tim.”

  “You had better be. God knows the truth of what’s in your heart, and if sincere contrition isn’t in your heart … The best way for you to show that it is is to change your life. I cannot absolve you if you aren’t sorry for what you’ve done and you don’t pledge to change your life.”

  Which Danielo did. Riordan did not believe one word of it, if for no other reason than Danielo was right: you did not quit “those people,” because to quit them was to hand yourself a death sentence. He couldn’t demand that a twenty-one-year-old kid sacrifice his life. There was in the end no choice but to take him at his word.

  But when he returned to the rectory, he was troubled by the thought that he’d immersed himself in a charade, a simulacrum of a sacrament. He felt like taking a shower in the hottest water he could stand.

  * * *

  His sermon on that Sunday in Advent did not express the usual anodyne sentiments about the joy of the Christmas season—all Christians awaiting, anticipation in their hearts, the birth of their Savior. He mounted the pulpit and, for five or six seconds, said nothing as he swept his eyes over the congregation. This was long enough to provoke some uneasiness, people clearing their throats, squirming in the pews. Good. Discomfort was the effect he wanted to achieve. His dramatic silence was followed by a dramatic gesture: he unfurled the visual aid he’d created the previous night out of an old bedsheet and draped it over the front of the pulpit. Printed on it in red block letters were the names of the eleven men slain by narcos in the parish in the past year alone. And still he did not speak, allowing another few seconds to pass before he startled everyone by uttering a single word in a full-throated voice:

  “SILENCE!”

  After an interval during which the parishioners froze in their seats and lifted their gazes to his face, he began:

  “Octavio Mirales … Roberto Sánchez … Miguel Patiño…” He read the rest of the names down to the last.

  “What you have just heard are the sounds that silence makes,” he said. “The names of our dead, young men torn from life by the criminals in our midst. This will be the topic of my sermon for today, silence and the sounds it makes.” Looking over the pews, he saw that he had everyone’s attention. No fidgeting or nodding off or wandering gazes—the typical responses to his homilies. “There are other sounds, the mourning of their mothers, their wives, their children … the grief that will shriek forever in the hearts of their fathers and brothers and sisters. What is silenced is the sound of gunfire, of a man’s screams as he is tortured before he is murdered, and this, too—of young women brutally kidnapped and raped.” He avoided making eye contact with Cristina Herrera, so as not to call attention to her. “It is the sound of our police officers telling the victim of a rape that she should consider herself fortunate not to have been killed.” His glance fell on a municipal police sergeant, Rigoberto Ochoa. “And it is the sound of witnesses to all these abominations … SAYING NOTHING!”

  Riordan paused and again scanned the congregation for several long seconds.“Most of you fear even to speak the name of the wolf pack that menaces us. I myself was reluctant to say it out loud—but no longer.… THE BROTHERHOOD! I will name them, too, the pack’s leaders: Ernesto Salazar. Enrique Mora. Rubén Levya! They are the wolves who savage us with abductions, murder, extortions.” Now he noticed movements in the pews, parishioners turning their heads right and left, as if expecting armed thugs to burst into the church at any moment, but he rolled on, praising the brave men who had volunteered for the citizens’ militia, scathing those who thought the narcos were the true valientes, exhorting everyone to abandon the house of silence and speak out. “If you know something, then say it. Report it to the authorities. I know that because of what happened here last month, many of you think the army and the Federal Police are as much your enemy as the Brotherhood—but we must give them a vote of confidence that they will have the resolve and the intention to deliver us from this evil. They cannot carry out their duties if we do not carry out ours, if we do not STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT!”

  Pausing once more, he looked from face to face and found Danielo García looking back at him with an obdurate tilt to his chin. “I want to remind you of another duty you have as Catholics,” he said, in the rhythms of a hellfire tent revivalist. “Some of you have fallen into criminal activities, some of you have colluded with the narcos, and so you have contributed to this culture of violence and death.… You are in a state of sin if you belong to the Brotherhood. To any narco gang. You know who you are.”

  He gave his parishioners a final, measured look before stepping down to the altar. Many people were staring at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses; no priest had ever spoken to them as he had.

  He felt light, relieved of a burden, as he led them through the Nicene Creed and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—Deliver us, O Lord, from every evil, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever—and through the consecrating of the hosts and wine, arriving at the high point of the Mass, Communion.

  Cuerpo de Cristo, he murmured. Sangre de Cristo, murmured the lay assistant beside him, proffering the chalice. Mouths opened at the Communion rail; the tips of tongues darted out. Like baby birds in a nest, he thought. Others took the host in cupped hands. Cuerpo de Cristo—Father Hugo was giving Communion at the rail on the right side of the center aisle. Sangre de Cristo, said Father Hugo’s assistant, wiping the chalice’s rim with a cloth before presenting it to the next communicant. Body of Christ. Blood of Christ. Intoned over and over. It seemed that everyone at Mass this Sunday had a spotless soul.

  With the rail emptied, those waiting in line behind stepped up and knelt, hands folded. César and Marta Díaz, César’s sister-in-law, Lupita. Was she still cursing God? Domingo and Delores Quiroga. He hesitated as he approached the next two: the Very Pious Señora Herrera and her daughter. Body of Christ, he whispered to the señora and sidestepped to Cristina, who, as her mother returned to their pew, bowed her head and crossed her arms over her chest. This gesture meant that she was in mortal sin but was asking for his blessing. Had she gone through with it? He blessed her, drawing the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. The García family was at the end of the rail: Jaime and his wife, his three sons, Danielo the last. Riordan placed the host on his upturned palms. Cuerpo de Cristo.

  Following the recessional, he took his customary place at the front door to greet his parishioners. Two or three mumbled congratulations for the sermon. César was more effusive, clapping him on the back. “You let us have it, Padre Tim, and good for you.” But most people merely nodded to him or shook his hand and went on their way; and some steered clear of him, as if he carried a contagion.

  As he went back into the church, he caught a movement in a corner of the vestibule. A figure stepped out of the shadows and stood still, hands crossed over his groin. It was Danielo.<
br />
  Riordan’s throat clutched. Danielo’s face seemed to have undergone a transformation: it looked as hard, cold, and immobile as the marble face of some cruel Roman emperor, and the eyes meeting Riordan’s were lifeless. It was probably the look Danielo put on when making his weekly collection, Riordan realized. But he couldn’t permit himself to be intimidated by a twenty-one-year-old thug.

  “What do you want, Danny?” he said brusquely.

  Danielo stuck out his tongue. The white glob on it looked like a wad of gum. He spat the Communion host at Riordan’s feet, turned, and walked outside, leaving Riordan so shocked that he could not move.

  * * *

  YouTube COMMUNIQUÉ #2

  VIDEO: Women in bright pastel dresses that hang like scalloped draperies are lined up in front of a cave that’s been converted into a house, the entrance modified and framed to form a door, the front faced with mortared river rocks. Some of the women carry dirt-smudged children in cloth sacks slúng from their backs, papoose-style; others hold toddlers by the hand. The children can be heard coughing and wheezing.

  AUDIO (VOICE-OVER): Brothers and sisters! Good day once again from the comandancia of the Brotherhood in the Sierra Madre. It is I, the Butterfly, who spreads his beautiful wings and flies to you wherever you are to bring you news. In my last communiqué, I promised justice, and it is news of justice I bring you. Two kinds of justice.

  Our Lord and Savior commands us to care for the poor and the sick. It is a command which we of the Brotherhood take seriously. This was the scene recently in the aldea of San Miguel, inhabited by the Tarahumara people …

  VIDEO: Two men in sun-bleached denim jackets seated behind a table made of planks laid across sawhorses. Small boxes of medication are spread on the table. CLOSE on a box. The label reads: Virazone. WIDE on the women as they step up one by one to the table, the two men handing tablets to each.

  AUDIO (VOICE-OVER): These children were suffering from infections in their lungs, from bronchitis and even pneumonia. When we of the Brotherhood learned about this, we immediately dispatched a medical team to be of assistance. Our team obtained this medicine and dispensed it to the sick children of San Miguel. This is social justice, brothers and sisters. Perhaps our government could stop sending soldiers to terrorize the people and instead send medical teams to heal them when they are sick.