“A being … Some say a being … some say a place.… Both … some say both. The devil and the kingdom of the devil.”
“Might that have been the ancient Hebrews’ way of explaining evil? God does not have full dominion. He shares dominion with Satan.”
Tearing his rheumy eyes away from the head, the Old Priest looked at Riordan as if he had gone mad. Riordan himself wondered if he had, the question was so wildly inappropriate.
“Padre, please … the police,” said the old man. “You must go now.”
“When the Mass has ended,” Riordan said.
* * *
Domingo had been kidnapped shortly after he and his wife came home from Midnight Mass. The street was dark, which was why they hadn’t noticed that both federales guarding their place had been shot to death in their car. Inspector Bonham speculated that they had been killed during the fiesta, possibly while Mass was in progress, to make sure there would be no witnesses. Their bodies, sprawled on the front seat, weren’t discovered until midday on Christmas. Nor were there any outward signs of violence—no bullet holes in the doors, no shattered glass. The driver’s-side window had been lowered, which led Bonham to conclude that the pair might have been talking to their killer. Both had been shot in the same way: two .40-calibers to the head.
He was interviewing Riordan in the municipal police station, just the two of them in an interrogation room furnished with a table and two metal chairs. Once, Rigoberto Ochoa—the municipal police sergeant—stuck his head in the door and asked if he could listen in. A sharp look from Bonham sent him away.
Delores had spent all of Christmas, day and night, under sedation, but she was now able to speak more or less coherently, Bonham continued. She’d had the house keys in her purse and entered through the front door. Aside from the briefest glimpse of two men in ski masks and a crack to her skull, she remembered nothing. When she came to, hog-tied and gagged, Domingo was gone. Bonham examined the scene with an evidence technician and determined that the kidnappers had dragged Domingo out through the back door, where they’d broken in, and into a vehicle in the dirt alley. Tracks indicated a pickup with heavy-duty tires. Then they took him somewhere and decapitated him. “The rest of Domingo’s body,” Bonham related, “is missing—”
“Dear God, they didn’t do that while he was still alive?” Riordan asked.
Bonham spread his hands and shrugged. If his kidnappers did kill him first, they must have shot him in the chest, because there were no wounds to his head. They’d wanted it intact.
Riordan knew he would see it the rest of his life, lying faceup, staring up at him through the ice, like the face of some ancient human discovered in a glacier.
“Your men were supposed to protect him, and they couldn’t even protect themselves.” Still dazed, he spoke in the voice of an automaton.
Ignoring the reproach, Bonham said, “This was a warning to Domingo’s brother—better start paying your cuota—but it was meant for you, too. You more than the brother. I don’t need to tell you what for.”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason, any reason at all, to think that Domingo was mixed up with the cartel?”
“No. I do not.”
“Any idea who might have done this?” asked Bonham.
Riordan’s eyes darted, seeking something, anything, to rest on. He would remember this moment, for he did not weigh pros and cons, pluses and minuses, and come to a decision. The decision had made itself. It had been sitting in his brain since the day before, waiting for him to find it.
“Talk to Danielo García,” he said.
“You think this García murdered Quiroga?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what to think.”
“Then why should we talk to him?”
“He’s not a little snapper. I’d put him in the barracuda category.”
Bonham clasped his hands behind his neck and slowly flapped his elbows. “C’mon, Padre. Stop being coy.”
“Danny thinks of himself as an executive, kind of an accounts manager in the Brotherhood’s extortion division. He makes sure the bills are paid on time. I can’t say if he was the one who put the squeeze on the Quirogas. His big—what should I call it? customer? client? victim?—is the copper mine. So much per week per metric ton. He didn’t say how much.”
Bonham squinted at Riordan. “He told you this?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“That would have been before our last conversation at the base.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you mention him then?”
Riordan answered by not answering. Bonham acknowledged with a low “Mmmmm-huh” and an almost imperceptible nod.
“It was privileged information?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So it took something like this for you to change your tune?”
“Don’t trivialize it, Inspector, Professor, whatever you are. Domingo was a good man, a decent man. These monsters will stop at nothing, so I guess I’d better not let anything stop me.”
The Inspector-Professor-Whatever-He-Was studied Riordan for a long moment. “You want to make things right, and this is the right way to do it.”
“No, it’s the wrong thing for the right reason.”
Bonham let out a laugh that sounded like a bark. “I’ve been known to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” Standing, he leaned across the table and placed his hands on Riordan’s shoulders. “I’ll speak plain. Valencia wants those names. He’s obsessed because we’re in prehistoric times in the Sierra Madre. The name of the game is dominance, and at the moment the score is: the Brotherhood, four soldiers, two cops; soldiers and cops, zero. Valencia means it when he says he’ll arrest every man, woman, and child in this town if that’s what it takes to find out who killed his boys. If we catch whoever murdered Quiroga, you’ll be the first to know. Which means that we had better be the first to know if someday somebody walks into your dark little closet and tells you he pulled a trigger on those four troopers. And anything else we might find useful. Plain enough? You’re in for a dime, in for a dollar.”
“Quid pro quo.”
“Precisamente! Exactamente!”
“The chances that anybody is going to confess to that are slim to nil,” Riordan said.
“But there is a chance, and we want it covered.”
“And the chances I could match a voice to a face, a face to a name…”
“We don’t expect you to ID anybody. If you can, fine; if you can’t, fine, too. All we want is to hear what you hear. You let us worry about the details.” Bonham sat down again and rocked his chair backward, bracing it against the wall. “But it is too bad you don’t have what I have.”
“A badge and a gun?”
“Ha! Synesthesia. Look it up. Your voice makes me see green circles—like sunspots, only they’re green. So let’s say I didn’t know who you were but that I’d seen you once or twice and heard you speak. Then let’s say we were in your dark little closet, and you said something. I’d see the green circles and remember what you looked like. It’s a gift, Padre Tim. Useful in my line of work.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He had broken the seal, excommunicated himself. Laete sententiae, meaning that it was automatic, arising from the act itself, no trial or tribunal or public rite of expulsion necessary. If knowledge of what he’d done (in canon law, it was called “betraying the penitent”) reached the bishop, he would be suspended from all clerical duties while his case rattled up through the hierarchy to the Vatican itself. Only the Pope could rule on such an ecclesiastical crime. And if the pontiff ruled against Riordan, he would be formally deposed from priestly office—that is, laicized; that is, defrocked.
But the only way the bishop could find out would be if Bonham or the captain told him, or if Riordan himself confessed. He wasn’t going to, because he had every intention of carrying on as if nothing had changed. O
therwise, he would be an ineffective asset. The priesthood would be his cover. He had betrayed García, and if in the future others came to him seeking to be absolved of extortion or smuggling or murder, he would betray them, too. Again and again and again until the Brotherhood was smashed and Ernesto Salazar was, in Valencia’s memorable phrase, carried “out of these mountains in irons or in a body bag.”
The deception would be on his conscience alone. Ah, what had happened to his conscience, which in its scrupulosity had so often freighted him with remorse for doing or saying or thinking things that weren’t wrong? Why did it not weigh on him in this instance? Maybe it had worn itself out through overuse.
* * *
Search parties failed to find Domingo’s body. His head was placed in a wooden box—that would have to do for a coffin—and carried out to the cemetery overlooking San Patricio. Another requiem, another widow, another recitation of empty words. Dozens attended the funeral, but they were not as stunned and outraged as Riordan wished them to be. They were inured to abominations, and he later heard murmurings that maybe, maybe Domingo had been tied up with the narcos. The thought that a perfectly innocent man would be murdered and butchered, his head delivered to a church on Christmas Day purely for the shock effect, was too awful to contemplate; therefore, he could not have been innocent. That was the logic throughout Mexico: only the guilty were killed, and the proof of their guilt was the fact that they had been killed.
During the first week of the new year, federales disguised as miners arrested Danielo García when he walked into the mine offices with his black bag. He was taken to Federal Police headquarters in Hermosillo, where, Bonham reported, he admitted to a number of crimes but not to involvement in Quiroga’s murder. The confession being sufficient, the formality of a judicial hearing was dispensed with, and he was shipped off to the Altiplano maximum security prison.
It was a farmer trucking produce into San Patricio for market day who found Jesús Delgado hanging from a tree alongside the Mesa Verde road. A piece of cardboard bearing the Brotherhood’s symbol and the word soplón—stool pigeon—had been driven into his chest with an ice pick. Within hours, almost everyone in the municipality knew about Jesús’s fate, and almost everyone agreed that it was justice—not for the crime he’d committed but justice all the same. When Riordan heard, his breath left him, as if he’d leapt into an icy lake. He picked up the burner phone and contacted Bonham, who informed him in the most offhanded way that Delgado had proved to be less than a rich vein of information. He’d supplied no details about the ambush or the fabricated execution, disclosing only the identities of a few low-level narcos—plankton, Valencia would say—and the locations of a meth lab or two. The plankton were arrested and the labs destroyed, after which the captain turned Delgado loose, ordering paratroopers to drive him to Mesa Verde and to make sure that everyone there saw them shaking his hand in thanks.
“Valencia should have told me he was going to do that,” Bonham added. “I would have talked him out of it. A stupid damn thing. Now anybody who might have something for us is going to be scared shitless to give us the time of day.”
Riordan ended the call and went into the church, intending to pray for Delgado’s soul; but as he knelt in the nave under the fresco of the Virgin of Guadalupe, he thought that he should pray for himself as well. He had played an unwitting role in Delgado’s death, yet he felt no remorse. All he felt was guilty about not feeling guilty. It seemed that his emotional temperature had plummeted to below freezing, carrying his moral temperature with it. He wondered if he was becoming like his enemy, the shepherd shape-shifted into a wolf.
Not long after the Epiphany, he had an epiphany all his own. He had gone out, late in the day, with Delores Quiroga to refresh the flowers on her husband’s grave. A furious light filled her eyes in place of tears.
“The animals who did this to my poor Domingo must be found and killed like the rabid dogs they are,” she cried.
It would have done no good to counsel her that bloodshed brought only more bloodshed, so Riordan kept quiet. But her words played and replayed in his mind that night, and would not let him sleep. The thought did come to him that doing whatever he could to find the “animals” would be the only way he could help her. Yet it was unacceptable for a priest to make himself an accomplice of vengeance. Agitated, he got out of bed, dressed in his warmest clothes, and went outside to seek calm in a survey of the stars.
Sirius, brightest of all, blazed in the southwest. As he looked at its blue-white glow, he saw that the shock he had suffered on Christmas morning had been more metaphysical than psychological. The daily cares of ministering had left him little time or energy for the Big Questions, such as: How can an all-just, all-loving God permit evil in the world? In the seminary, he’d been taught that the existence of evil was the price man paid for his free will. Without the capacity to choose between right and wrong, a human being had no more volition than a puppet. And if that explanation did not suffice, his teachers had argued, then one had to resign oneself to the inscrutability of the divine mind, whose intentions could not be fathomed by the limited human mind. Those rationales had served Riordan for twenty-six years, but what he had seen two weeks ago belonged to a higher order of evil. The demented humor in the gift wrapping and the Santa Claus hat and the card’s holiday greeting, along with the fact that the atrocity had been perpetrated on one of Christianity’s two holiest days, had struck at the foundations of his vocation, his faith, his entire life. On the day commemorating the birth of His incarnate Son, God had done nothing to prevent the horror. How to explain His failure except to argue that either He did not care or He did not exist.
This might have been the insight he had struggled to lay hold of as he sat transfixed by Domingo’s bodiless head. For more than two weeks, it had skulked at the peripheries of his consciousness, like a jewel thief casing a mansion. Now he invited it forward: C’mon in, have a seat, have a drink, let’s see if we can come to terms, me the excommunicated priest and you the Big Question: Is God a myth no more real than the Easter Bunny or is He a Supreme Being supremely apathetic toward His own creation? Whichever, we are in H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmos, which turns on and on, as indifferent to man’s fate and entreaties as the gears of a clock to a condemned prisoner’s cries at the hour of his execution.
Then, an inspiration of the moment, a third alternative: Consider that the multiverse posited by cosmologists is a fact, he thought. There isn’t one universe but millions, coming into and passing out of existence every minute, each in its own dimensions. God does reign with love and justice in one of those universes, the one I used to inhabit. But the instant I opened that chest and saw what lay therein, I was thrust into an alternate moral universe from which He is absent—a realm of the blackest wonders, where anything is possible and the worst monstrosities are permitted. In such a cosmos, my vow to uphold the sanctity of the confessional is an absurd abstraction, a parlor game, like estimating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Here, neither angels nor God are real. Delores Quiroga, lying bound and gagged while her husband is dragged off to be slaughtered, is real; the spattered blood and brains of the slain policemen are real; Domingo’s head is real.
If he really believed what was going through his head, he understood, he would have no choice but to leave the priesthood and the church. The laicization procedure could be long and complicated—he’d looked into it years ago, when he was in love with Marcella. Laicizing—turning a priest into a layman—sounded like some transformative chemical or biological process. Homogenizing. Vulcanizing. He would plead that he was no longer able to live up to the standards expected of a priest. Then what? Go back to the States. Teaching was probably the only way he could make a living. Art history, as before, or philosophy. Not useful subjects as Americans understood learning to be useful. He would prefer astronomy, except that he had a sketchy background in math and no training, no experience beyond his amateur stargazing. Well, he could go back to school.
The University of Arizona had a fine astronomy department. A teaching job or returning to college—either one was a reasonable possibility. But in the next whirl of thought, he knew he would never take such a momentous step. He had been a priest for half his life; he could not imagine himself as anything else. And he would feel like a deserter, abandoning his parishioners in a time of peril.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A roofing contractor from Hermosillo showed up one morning with a truck and crew and began to repair the dome. He said not to worry about the charges; those had been taken care of by a benefactor who wished to remain anonymous. The roofer must have come at Bonham’s behest, but Riordan did not press him for any further information. Later, another contractor arrived, also from Hermosillo, and inspected the church’s plumbing and electrical systems. Both needed work, he reported. Riordan had known about the plumbing problems, but the wiring, too? Yes, answered the contractor. It was very old and frayed, and if it wasn’t fixed, there could be short circuits and a fire. He, too, said not to worry about the bill. As he had done with the roofer, Riordan showed his gratitude by not asking who had arranged and paid for his services. He found himself curiously incurious.
For the next couple of weeks, tradesmen crawled over the roof, scuttled through the interior of the church and the rectory, making a racket with their power tools.
* * *
Toward the end of January, every pastor in the Archdiocese of Hermosillo received a letter from the bishop, Arturo Peralta. It called their attention to a forthcoming visit by one Father Calixto Banderas, a prominent exorcist from Mexico City. Violence in Sonora—indeed, throughout the country—had become so perverse, so extreme, so hideous, wrote His Excellency, that he now questioned the political and sociological explanations for it. The ghastly crime recently committed in San Patricio, with which “you are all by now familiar,” was the most recent example. Such violations of all human norms, and the utter failure of state institutions—the government, the military, the police, the courts—to contain them, much less to stop them, strongly suggested a diabolical influence. After conferring at length with his fellow prelates, the bishop had concluded that the country was suffering from an infestation of demons. These evil spirits might be punishment for the proliferation of pagan cults like the cult of La Santa Muerte; they might be a demonstration of what happens when people abandon their faith. Whatever the reason for the plague, Bishop Peralta had called for exorcisms in the parishes under his jurisdiction.
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