Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  Six paratroopers stayed behind to guard the rear of the house and the couple who had suffered coitus interruptus; the remaining twenty men grabbed their cases and filed outside, led by Valencia’s bugler playing brassy norteño riffs and another musically inclined soldier strumming a guitar. Precise as a marching band, which in a sense they were, the soldiers formed an L around the yard, a maneuver they’d practiced at the base. They opened the cases, the tops facing outward to hide the weapons from the guests. There were about thirty, seated at two long tables, under piñatas hung from poles. Favorable odds, the Professor thought, fighting to keep his excitement under control. He estimated that slightly better than half were men, swilling cans of Tecate and Dos Equis. A bit drunk already, their attention on their girlfriends. And lightly armed, pistols in waistbands or back pockets, but no assault rifles in sight. They felt secure up here in Salazar’s aerie. Very favorable odds.

  The Professor and his men took the stage and pretended to be hooking up speakers. The trumpeter and the guitarist continued to play, rather badly; but no one seemed to notice. Levya was taking a long time to produce the birthday boy. The Professor sensed a tension rippling through his team and Valencia’s. The guests, too, were growing restless. A narco in a sequined shirt yelled toward the house, “Ernesto! Jefe! Come on out so we can sing to you,” and then, facing the stage: “C’mon, you guys, start playing! Start singing!”

  The trumpeter blew the opening bars of “Las Mañanitas.” The man in the sequined shirt jumped up and, raising his beer can, began to sing:

  Estas son las mañanitas

  que cantable a el rey David.

  Hoy por ser cumpleaños

  te las cantamos aquí.

  These are the dawns

  that King David sang about.

  We sing here today

  Because today is your birthday.

  The Professor’s synesthesia switched on. He saw brass cylinders pumping up and down, like organ pipes in motion, as another man joined in, and another.

  El día en que tú naciste

  nacieron todas las flores.

  Ya viene amaneciendo

  ya la luz del dia nos dío.

  All flowers were born on the day

  you were born.

  Dawn is arriving and

  the light of day is upon us.

  Someone else yelled to the musicians, “Play! Play! Where are the guitars and violins?” Another, looking toward the front door, shouted, “Oye! Don Ernesto! Feliz cumpleaños! Ven afuera!”

  But Salazar remained inside with Levya and Mora. The Professor could feel, as a tangible sensation, control of the situation slipping away. He removed his sombrero, prepared to give it a Frisbee toss—the prearranged signal to make the arrests. A single gunshot cracked inside the house. “Now!” the Professor shouted as he sailed the sombrero across the tables. The well-drilled men quickly pulled their assault carbines from the cases as he drew his pistol and called out: “Federal police! You are all under arrest! Nobody move!”

  At that instant, there was a burst of automatic fire from inside, bullets shattering a front window, ripping chunks out of the veranda posts, and smashing a piñata, which spilled candy bars and airline bottles of tequila. The partygoers dived under the tables or ran toward cover, narcos pulling their pistols. The Professor shot one; someone else dropped two others as Valencia and a squad of soldiers charged the house and flattened themselves against the wall, three on each side of the door. The Professor sprinted to them. A paratrooper—it was Sublieutenant Almazán—kicked the door open and stepped inside, the Professor and Valencia behind him. They had a half second’s glimpse of a man vanishing down a long hallway.

  “Alto!” Valencia commanded.

  Enrique Mora spun and fired four or five rapid shots, two rounds striking Almazán’s armored vest, flinging him backward into Valencia, who tumbled into the Professor, all three falling into a heap. To an outside observer, they would have looked like the Keystone Kops.

  “Hijo de puta!” the captain cursed, untangling himself. The Professor pulled Almazán away from the door. His fancy frilled shirt was perforated: there would be bruises under the vest’s Kevlar plates, but he was otherwise unhurt.

  Levya lay facedown near the shattered window, in what looked like a gallon of spilled maroon paint. His pistol was still in his hand. What had happened was a question to be addressed later. The Professor noticed blood drops leading across the clay-tile floor into the hallway. Mora had been healthy enough to squeeze off a few rounds; the blood must have come from Salazar.

  With Valencia and the others, he followed the trail down the hall to a closed door at its end. A paratrooper kicked it down and tossed a stun grenade into the room. They rushed inside. It was a storeroom with metal shelving units, one of which had nothing in it and had been pulled away from the wall. In the floor behind the empty case, an open trapdoor revealed a shaft about three meters deep. Red droplets on the ladder shone in the light of the bare bulb overhead. The Professor climbed down, into the stale air, and stood in front of a steel door that could have come off a bank vault. He grabbed the handle and gave it a shake and it didn’t so much as rattle. He squinted. The imperfect fit showed him that the door was dogged tight to a mine timber by three dead bolts, top, center, bottom. The latches would be on the other side, and so was the tunnel through which Salazar and Mora had fled.

  “Capitán, do you see this?” he said, looking upward.

  Valencia’s face showed in the shaft opening above. “Hijo de puta!”

  The Professor climbed out of the shaft and went back down the hall to the front room. Squatting, he picked up Levya’s pistol, an H&K like his own. Ejecting the magazine, he found one round missing; on the other side of the room, there were seventeen .40-caliber shell casings.

  “What the…” Valencia stammered.

  “Looks like Levya took a shot at Salazar or Mora.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “Might as well ask him.” He gestured at the corpse. “Maybe they were on to him … and on to us. One of them, maybe both, let him have it. He’s got more holes in him than a colander.”

  And we, he thought, have been hit in the mouth.

  * * *

  But not that hard.

  The operation was a partial success: twenty-four people were arrested and flown to Hermosillo, where three were discovered to be high-value targets. One was Salazar’s liaison to Colombian and Peruvian cocaine suppliers; another ran a network of wholesale heroin buyers in the United States; and a third served as the Brotherhood’s bribery chief, distributing mordida on both sides of the border. Three more bosses had been killed in the brief firefight at the ranch.

  Twenty kilos of black tar heroin bricks, more than a hundred kilos of high-grade coke—Peruvian pink—and an arsenal of pistols, assault rifles, and grenade launchers were found in the warehouse. Not the biggest haul in history, but sufficient to further blunt the sting of the Butterfly’s underground flight. All the booty was flown back to the San Patricio base with the prisoners, and Valencia’s PR man summoned the media.

  It took a full day after the raid to assemble a team of engineers and trackers and fly them to the ranch. The engineers blew the steel door open, and the trackers, with their dogs, followed the tunnel almost a kilometer to its exit in a corral, where any scent left by Salazar and Mora was lost in the piles of manure.

  An extensive manhunt got under way—roadblocks, helicopters overflying the mountains, military and police patrols combing them on foot. The media loved it, especially the angle of paratroopers and federal cops disguised as mariachis. Mexico City correspondents for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times showed up at the base. So did CNN, filming Valencia and his men, back in uniform, faces masked, posing with the captured narcos, the confiscated weapons and drugs forming a backdrop.

  The Professor had always been mediaphobic. This was a matter not of humility but of survival. Keeping his face off television and his name out of th
e newspapers had kept his body out of prison or a shallow grave, the two places where most citizens of narcoland ended their careers. But for this occasion, he allowed reporters to interview him, on the condition that he not be filmed, photographed, or identified by name. He thought it prudent to tell the press that Rubén Levya had been killed while attempting to escape with Salazar and Mora. “One down, two to go,” he said.

  * * *

  A day after the news broke, Carrasco phoned on his encrypted cell phone.

  “You guys fucked up,” he said. “How could you let that skinny maricón get away?”

  “Good to hear your voice, Joaquín,” the Professor said, pleased that betraying him would no longer be necessary. “He’s wounded, he’s in the Sierra—on foot, most likely. Only a matter of time.”

  “How is the weather where you are?”

  “Warm. It’s spring.”

  “It’s still winter up here. Cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s dick. What am I doing, freezing my ass off when there’s money to be made?”

  “Joaquín! You’re worth billions.”

  “I don’t mean the money. I mean the action. I miss the action, Profesor.”

  * * *

  Brigadier General Carrillo, the overall commander of Joint Operation Falcon, arrived at the base with Comandante Pérez to personally commend the Professor and Valencia for their courage and professionalism. In addition to the drug and weapons haul, Salazar’s laptop had been seized, its hard drive scoured. Rough drafts of his revolutionary manifesto turned up: a muddle of political rants and religious nonsense that made Ted Kaczynski’s ravings sound reasonable. Copies were distributed to the newspapers and the TV networks. A phone directory listing the numbers of state and federal legislators, police chiefs, and mayors, as well as a spread sheet showing the amounts paid to each, were not brought to the media’s attention. They conveniently vanished, which incensed Valencia the Incorruptible. This was what bred cynicism and made real change impossible! he fumed. This was why the narcos would never be defeated! Corruption at all levels tolerated, kept secret! Did these compromised officials know that they had taken bribes from a man plotting to overthrow them? He had a good mind to call a press conference and expose every one of them. The Professor advised him to calm down, but Valencia unloaded on General Carrillo, who listened with a solemn expression on his jowly face and said he shared the capitán’s outrage; but was this an issue for the army to take on? Of course not. The army was here to protect the nation from external and internal threats, not to concern itself with crooked politicians. Meanwhile, it would be best if the capitán kept his thoughts and feelings private. This counsel was given for the capitán’s benefit—he had been recommended for promotion to major. This news delighted the capitán, and procured his silence.

  * * *

  It might have been residual anger that needed venting, it might have been his frustration over Salazar’s escape, or his fierce anticlericism, or his bad temper, or all of the above that prodded Valencia into picking a fight with Padre Riordan the next evening. Valencia and the Professor were in the plaza, supervising a changing of the guard: regional troops and state police had been dispatched to garrison the town while the federales and paratroopers hunted the two fugitives. After issuing final instructions to the new men, and spotting the priest standing on the church steps, Valencia made an abrupt turn and went up to him.

  “Shouldn’t you be at Vespers or wherever it is you people go at this hour?” he asked brusquely. “What are you doing here?”

  “I believe this is my church,” Riordan replied in a tranquil voice. “I wanted to see what was going on.” He made a lazy movement at the military and police vehicles ringing the plaza. An electric sunset reddened the desert-beige Humvees and SandCats. “You would think we were under martial law.”

  “You may consider that you are until we have Salazar.”

  “I’m quite sure he isn’t in town. The news says that he’s—”

  “I know what the news says.”

  “Well, congratulations, anyway.” He tilted his head at the Professor. “And you, too.”

  “You are being sarcastic?” Valencia said—an accusation rather than a question.

  “No, not at all. The news says that you—”

  “I told you, I know what the news says.” The captain, who had been standing one step below Riordan, hopped up to put himself on equal footing. “I will be interested to hear what you say in the future. As long as that hijo de la puta is on the loose, the war is not over. Who knows? Maybe someone in your parish this very minute is harboring that criminal. And there is some other unfinished business besides. You know what it is.” He jabbed the priest in the solar plexus. “I remind you: we are to hear what you hear.”

  For a brief interval, Riordan shrank back, baffled by the unprovoked aggression. Then, recovering, he leaned forward and traded glares with Valencia. They looked like two fighters trying to intimidate each other before the opening bell.

  “I think I know what is aggravating you, Captain,” Riordan said, maintaining his pacific tone. There was a change in him, the Professor noticed. He seemed more confident, more at ease in his own skin. “The fact that you had to rely on a priest to get what you need,” Riordan continued. “You’ve just got to prove that you’re the big dog. I wasn’t going to—”

  Valencia interrupted with angry laughter. “Inspector Bonham! Do you hear this? I am being psychoanalyzed by this parasite! This witch doctor!”

  “Alberto. Eso es suficiente,” the Professor said, embarrassed by the outburst. “Vamonos.”

  Valencia didn’t budge; neither did Riordan. “I was about to say that I wasn’t going to mention this until the right moment,” the priest went on, but with harsher intonations than before. “But here we are—at the right moment. If I hear anything on the street—and I doubt I will, but if I do—you’ll hear it. You’re not going to hear anything said to me in confidence. In what you call my ‘dark little closet.’ You can consider this my resignation.”

  A plasticity came to Valencia’s normally stiff, martial face, his features molding themselves into an expression of contempt and astonishment.

  “I warned you about the consequences,” he said.

  “My bishop is out of the country right now,” Riordan answered. “I have an appointment to see him after he returns. He’ll hear everything I’ve done—from me. And then we’ll see what happens. I’m sure you can capture your man without my help.”

  “Correct,” the Professor agreed, attempting to steer the conversation in another direction. “The padre has served his purpose.”

  But for the captain, Riordan’s usefulness was not the issue. “If you were wearing a uniform, I would charge you with desertion. I would have you court-martialed for cowardice,” he said, casting a cold gray eye on Riordan. “But since you are not in uniform…” He heaved his chest and spat in the priest’s face.

  Riordan wiped the spit off with his sleeve. “I’ll pray for you, Captain Valencia.”

  “Better that you pray for yourself.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  There was no horizon when Riordan gazed eastward to the Sierra Madre. The mountains’ blackness matched the blackness of the sky. He could tell the difference only by the absence of stars below a certain altitude. Vega was visible, Deneb barely showed itself, and Altair was hidden entirely. He continued his circle, imagining himself as a tracking telescope as he turned to the south, where Antares glimmered and Spica rode beside the yellowish disk of Saturn. Then he revolved all the way around, through the Milky Way’s colorless dust, past the setting moon to Polaris, a glowing white rivet fixed to its place in the heavens. Holding his eyes on it, he felt a buoyancy, as if he might rise out of the earth’s sordid atmosphere, out of the shackles of its gravity, and at last out of his own body, his mind liberated to float freely among the cosmos. That was his idea of paradise: his disembodied consciousness touring creation eternally, its beauty ever before him, its deepest secret
s revealed.

  Altair appeared, seeming to draw the dawn up over the mountains, then vanished in the brightening sky. Before returning to the rectory, he purposely looked at the iron-barred courtyard gate to test himself. The sight evoked a memory of what he had found there three months ago, but without a fresh awakening of horror and disbelief—all the pain of what had been a profound spiritual trauma. He took this to be a sign of recovery.

  He walked down the arcade that formed a gallery along the rectory’s rear wall, his steps so quick and light that his boot heels made barely a sound on the paving stones, worn to the smoothness and polish of marble. Spanish friars had trod these same stones. He liked to feel them under his feet; they provided him with a physical connection to the missionaries who had preceded him—his ancestors, as it were.

  He glided into the bathroom, washed up, shaved, brushed his hair, and changed into his riding clothes. No longer an informant, he felt as if he’d shed a heavy backpack after an uphill hike. The burden would not be fully lifted until he’d confessed to Bishop Perralta. The bishop—the same one who had called for the exorcisms—was a conservative and unlikely to be lenient, though Riordan’s motives might be a mitigating factor. How odd that a private citizen would be commended for doing what he had done; yet it branded him an ecclesiastical criminal. Still, he was resolved to make a clean breast of things; and this resolution gripped him so powerfully that he felt as though he’d already carried it out. Better be careful, he cautioned himself. Merely having a good intention isn’t the same as doing the thing intended.

  Father Hugo gave him a scandalized look when he appeared at morning prayers wearing a biker’s jacket and black leather chaps over blue jeans. The vicar did not say anything until their Lenten breakfast of tea and tortillas.