Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

Valencia removed a handheld from a cargo pocket and radioed the drivers, ordering them to bring up the SandCats. He glowed, he sparkled: Julián and Mora would be taken to the base, the media alerted, and he would perp-walk them past the cameras like a Caesar parading captive kings.

  The Professor dug a thumb under Julián’s chin, jerked his head up and held it there, forcing Julián to look straight into his face.

  “You’re not Ernesto Salazar, you’re Julián Menéndez—let’s be on the up-and-up with each other, all right? It’s been a long time, but I haven’t changed that much. Do you recognize me?”

  Julián blinked and croaked, “No.”

  “You will when you’re feeling better. Care to tell us what happened at your birthday fiesta?”

  Julián did not say anything.

  “How about you, Enrique? Rubén Levya shot Julián for some reason, then you or both of you killed him.”

  “There was a disagreement,” Mora said, gritting his teeth against the ache in his skull.

  “More detail would be helpful. You put at least a dozen bullets into him.”

  “Only a dozen? We must have missed with a few.”

  The Professor laughed but without mirth. “All right. These questions can wait. We’ll have all kinds of time to get them answered.”

  “I answer you now,” Mora said. “Your trick didn’t fool Don Ernesto. He saw you coming out and he knew you weren’t músicos but fucking chotas. We put on our vests and got ready. But that traitor Levya, he drew his pistol and takes a shot at the boss, and then we fucked him up. Okay? Now you know. Now you tell me how you did it. How did you turn him?”

  “You don’t ask questions,” the Professor said. “We do.”

  “And I have one I want answered,” Valencia said. “Three months ago, an army patrol was ambushed, a video made of the soldiers’ executions. Who did this? What were the sicarios’ names?”

  Neither prisoner answered. Julián probably wasn’t capable of answering. Taking the good-cop role, the Professor told him, in an avuncular tone, that if they had wanted to kill him and his number two, they would have. Personally, he didn’t give a damn who had been in on the ambush, who had made the video, who had staged the fake executions; but this information was important to the capitán …

  Julián turned to him. He, too, hadn’t changed all that much in the past decade: his face was fuller and more lined, but he had the same sand-colored hair, with its slightly reddish tint, the same faint spray of freckles across his cheeks—inheritances from his half-Irish mother. A startled recognition flared in Julián’s eyes.

  “You! You!” he cried out, in English.

  “Ah, you’re feeling better. Sí, soy yo. I’ve waited ten years to put you away.” The Professor flashed a jovial, careless smile. “Which do you prefer? English or Spanish?”

  Mora made a rumbling sound in his throat, like someone hawking up a lungful of phlegm. “Stop fucking with him. That’s a great man you’re fucking with. A man chosen to rid Mexico of tyrants, like the ones you work for.”

  “You seem to be feeling muy valiente, Enrique,” said the Professor.

  “I don’t give a shit, that’s why.”

  “Then maybe we should fuck with you,” Valencia said, standing close enough to poke Mora’s forehead with his rifle muzzle. “If you wish us to fuck with you instead of with the savior of Mexico, we will be happy to do it. We can show you how we fuck with narcos.”

  Mora’s heavy lids fell slowly, then rose again, just as slowly.

  “Fuck with somebody else.”

  “Who?” Valencia made a parody of looking around the ramada. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Then go fuck yourselves.”

  “Stop trying to provoke us, Enrique. Your face alone is a provocation. You are extremely ugly. They call you El Serpiente, but that is an insult to snakes.”

  “It wasn’t us.… Don’t need to … Not us…”

  Julián’s words were so soft and halting that neither Valencia nor the Professor reacted immediately. Julián’s head drooped. Almost in a faint, he leaned against Mora. With the two of them chained together, they looked like some two-headed freak in a carnival show.

  “He means we did not spring the ambush,” Mora chimed in. “I wish we did. I wish it had been us and that you shits were in the truck when we did.”

  “Enrique, escúchame,” Valencia said. “Do you see this?” He twirled the rifle like a baton so the butt end was aimed at Mora’s face. “This is what hit you in the head. If you say another word except to answer a question, it will hit you in the mouth. It will hit you so hard that you will be shitting your own teeth for a week. Está claro? Inform us. Who was it if it wasn’t you?”

  The story had hardly begun before it was interrupted by the SandCat drivers, announcing their arrival, and, right behind them, by the American doctor, Moreno, and her nurse. Entering the ramada, both women took in the scene. The Professor noticed that they hung back for a moment, as if they weren’t quite sure that they were now safe.

  “I thank you for what you’ve done,” Moreno said, stepping forward. “I’m not finished with him yet.”

  “Then finish and be quick about it,” Valencia said.

  Which she was. In under five minutes, she had the arm packed with gauze, bandaged, and immobilized in a sling taped snugly across Julián’s chest. Then Valencia, in his abrupt, captain-of-paratroopers way, ordered her and the nurse to leave; they were finished with the patient, but he wasn’t.

  The doctor objected: her patient had to be evacuated immediately and brought to a hospital, because he was in danger of losing his arm.

  “I do not give a shit if it falls off this minute,” Valencia snarled. “Go.”

  It was the nurse who convinced her. She was plainly terrified by Mora, who had been glaring at her with pure, implacable hatred. He didn’t need superior powers of deduction to have figured out that she was ultimately responsible for the situation in which he and Julián now found themselves.

  Mora’s account resumed.

  Brotherhood lookouts had spotted the army truck on the road. They went to investigate and found two soldiers lying dead outside, two more inside, all four with pictures of La Santa Muerte pinned to their shirts.

  “And then what?” Valencia said, shaking Mora.

  But it was Julián who replied: “Someone … tried to make it … make it … look like us…”

  “And then what? You expect me to believe you have no idea who those sicarios were?”

  Unable to go on, Julián slumped into Mora’s shoulder like a tired child. All the Professor could feel toward him now was utter contempt. The boss of the dreaded Brotherhood, the would-be revolutionary, had chirped like any small-time snitch, eager to prove his innocence. Innocence. You would have an easier time finding a penguin in Mexico than one innocent man.

  “You!” Valencia said to Mora. “Then what?”

  “It was Levya’s idea.”

  “What was?”

  “The video.”

  “What about the video?”

  “Levya … he says, ‘Okay, someone wants to pin this ambush on us, let us take credit, but not for an ambush. For an execution. We will make it look like we captured these paracaidistas and executed them. To show that La Fraternidad avenges the killing of the kids in San Patricio, so the people of the town will come back to our side. Also to show that we are not afraid even of the great paratroopers—’”

  “You think I am going to believe that?” Valencia said.

  The Professor had had enough of the captain’s obsession. Nudging him to go outside, he followed, then said, quietly, that Mora and Julián could not have fabricated this tale on the spur of the moment.

  “They could have made it up before,” Valencia murmured.

  “There would have been no need to! They wanted to take credit!” the Professor said, now beyond fed up. He pointed out that the story fit in neatly with their own theory that some unknown gang had staged the ambush. There wa
s no sense in wasting another minute on this sideshow. Time to go, time to load the prisoners in the SandCats and start for the base. It would be close to daybreak by the time they got there.

  To his amazement—and gratification—Valencia agreed. They went back inside. But the captain was not quite finished.

  “So you collected the bodies and you took them somewhere,” the captain said to Mora. “You tied them to chairs and you shot them, to make your video more entertaining.” His jaw muscles rippled and twitched. “You murdered the murdered men. My men.”

  “If that is how you want to put it—”

  “Are you still fearless, Enrique? Or are you now afraid of us, the great paratroopers?”

  “What do you think?”

  Mora’s mouth and nose exploded, a burst of blood and teeth and saliva, of red and white, like a tomato smashed by a hammer. His head snapped backward from the blow of Valencia’s rifle butt, then flipped forward as he tumbled off the bench and onto the floor, gagging and spitting, pulling Julián down on top of him.

  “I think if you are not,” Valencia said, “you should be.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After Ernesto Salazar’s capture, it was as if a thunderstorm had passed through San Patricio; the air felt lighter. The town was no longer under siege, liberated from the Brotherhood’s terror and from military occupation as well. The checkpoints on the roads were removed, the federales and soldiers withdrawn from the streets and returned to their barracks.

  The Fiesta de la Santa Semana, when the Mayo reenacted Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, promised to be more festive than it had been in years. Lisette always showed up for the opening ceremonies on the day before Holy Thursday, but she missed them on this particular Wednesday; she was driving Pamela to San Patricio from the Hermosillo airport.

  The sojourn in the States had done her good. The woman who returned to Mexico was fully Pamela A, self-possessed and happy to see Lisette, embracing her when they met in baggage claim, giving her a warm kiss in the car before they pulled out of the lot. Despite a long flight and a delay while changing planes in Phoenix, she looked relaxed: the squint lines that came from studying canvases for too long were ironed out, and she was stylishly dressed in a pearl choker and flowing black slacks, her hair pinned up, the way Lisette liked it.

  “All right, now you can tell me all about your adventure,” she said as they swung off Mex 15, onto the state highway.

  Ordeal is more like it, Lisette thought.

  Salazar’s arrest and the dismantling of his cartel had made the national news in the States. Pamela had phoned right after she’d seen the report on CNN and heard mention of an American doctor, otherwise not identified, who had been treating him for a bullet wound when he was seized.

  “I knew it had to be you,” she had said, and followed with a rush of questions: “Are you all right? Are you safe? What happened?”

  Lisette had confirmed that it had been she, and yes, she was safe. As for what happened, she would give Pamela all the dramatic details when she got home.

  “I’ve got some news, too,” Pamela had said, after a pause. San Patricio was not her idea of home.

  Now, driving through the scrub desert east of Hermosillo, Lisette narrated the events of those eight or ten hours in San Tomás. The odd thing was that in talking about the experience, she felt as frightened as when she’d lived it.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Pamela staring at her, her lips parted.

  “Holy moly! It sounds like a movie.”

  “It felt like a movie,” said Lisette. “Like I was watching myself.”

  “I don’t know how you did it. I would have been a pile of gush if I’d been there. What happened to him? Did he lose the arm?”

  “He still had it the last time I saw him. On TV. They were hauling him off to prison. There were a couple of American reporters on the story. They wanted to interview me—what else? I stopped answering the phone and the door. The last thing I need is that kind of publicity.”

  “Because you had a hand, kind of, in getting that guy arrested?”

  “Yeah. Salazar still has loyal followers out there in the boondocks, and they might not take kindly to me if they knew.” Lisette slowed down as a cow and her calf ambled across the road ahead. “I asked one of the cops, this strange guy—looks and talks like a gringo; I think he might be DEA or something—I asked him not to say anything to the press about Anna’s and my involvement. Just tell them that they found us taking care of Salazar. Which he did.”

  “More and more like a movie,” Pamela said. She looked out the side window at the pools of Mexican poppies collected beneath the saguaro and organ pipe cacti. “Kind of weird being back here.”

  Lisette ignored the remark. “So how did it all go in Philadelphia? In your last e-mail, you said your father took the news about Evangelina pretty well and that you got along okay with Lady Iago.”

  Pamela huffed. “I can’t say I got along with her. I told her all about you, about us, and I guess she finally accepts what I am. Didn’t stop her from getting in a dig, though.”

  “Which was?”

  “That she’s resigned herself to not getting any grandchildren from her one and only daughter. That even if her lesbo daughter took out a sperm-bank loan, she’s now too old to have kids.”

  “How sweet.”

  “Forty-four isn’t too old.”

  “It is cutting it kind of close,” Lisette said.

  “I have a cousin who had a perfectly healthy boy at forty-six,” said Pamela, with a feeble ring of hopefulness. “And there’s always the adoption option.”

  Did she want to have kids? Lisette decided not to pursue that subject.

  Pamela fell silent—perhaps brooding over her mother’s charming commentary—and gazed out the window again, at underfed cows plodding along a barbed-wire fence, from which white plastic bags flapped like tattered flags of surrender. She reached into her purse, checked her phone, and muttered, “No service.”

  “And there won’t be any for the next twenty miles,” Lisette said. “All right. What’s your news?”

  Placing the phone in her lap, Pamela replied, “It’s good. Two pieces of good news.”

  “C’mon. Shoot.”

  The first piece was that a cutting-edge Philadelphia gallery, the Wexler, had seen photos of her latest work and liked what they saw and agreed to exhibit the paintings in June. She’d signed the contract—a sixty-forty split on any sales.

  “They’re going to pair me with Roberto Lugo,” Pamela added with a catch in her breath.

  “Enlighten the philistine, please.”

  “He’s a ceramicist mostly, but does some work on canvas. Very hip. He grew up in Philadelphia, too. In North Philly. The Puerto Rican barrio. The idea is two artists from the same town, way different backgrounds—”

  “The Latino street kid and the Main Line Wasp?” Lisette said, her eyes fixed on the winding road as it climbed into the Sierra foothills.

  “That’s it, yeah.” Pamela did not say anything for a few minutes, looking at her phone or out the window, seemingly preoccupied.

  “I’m going to be a whirling dervish the next couple of months!” she exclaimed, breaking her pensive silence. “Going through the stuff I’ve done, turning out a few new things. I feel like I’m on the launch pad.… No … the relaunch pad.… And counting down to”—she shot a fist at the roof—“blastoff!”

  “I’m happy for you,” Lisette said, as if reading from a greeting card. She wasn’t sure what this development would mean for their relationship, and Pamela’s exuberant outburst put her on edge. “What’s the second piece?”

  “I don’t want to say just yet. I’m waiting to hear.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Really. I’m superstitious about some things. I’ll tell you as soon as I know.”

  * * *

  The next day was Holy Thursday. Following the script for the Mayo Easter-week fiesta, the Phari
sees, led by men swaddled in blankets, their faces hidden by fierce-looking, wooden masks, took possession of the church and captured a statue of Jesus, which they would hold until defeated by the armies of Christ on Holy Saturday.

  Unable to resume her restoration work, Pamela occupied herself with selecting canvases for the exhibition and with a new painting: a mad swirl of clashing pigments and shapes suggesting blossoms with vulvas at their center. When she took a break, it was to check her phone for a message confirming the second piece of good news—whatever that was. Absorbed, she paid no attention to the patients who passed through the courtyard to Lisette’s clinic, and not much more to Lisette herself. She’d entered her own world. Wherever it is, it isn’t here, Lisette thought, feeling the peculiar loneliness that descended when you were living with someone who wasn’t living with you.

  Late on Good Friday afternoon, Lisette had a walk-in: Cristina Herrera. Still in her dark blue and white uniform, shouldering a backpack full of books, she must have come straight from high school.

  “You have some time, Dr. Lisette?” she asked modestly.

  “It happens that I do.” Lisette pushed the microscope and the slides she was preparing to one side of her desk, then indicated a cast-off kitchen chair that now served as a seat for her patients. “Please, sit down. What brings you here?”

  Dropping the backpack, Cristina sat with her shoulders squared and her hands clasped firmly in her lap. She had her mother’s long, narrow face and downturned mouth, but where Señora Herrera’s features reflected her dour personality, the effect on Cristina was one of melancholy.

  “What are those?” she said, motioning at the slides.

  “You’ve studied biology in school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, these are slides of bacteria from the water in one of the villages in the Sierra. There has been an outbreak of dysentery and diarrhea there, because the people don’t boil the water before they drink it. I’m going to show them these bacteria through the microscope so I can convince them to boil their water. Would you like to see what the germs look like?”

  She inserted a slide under the scope. Cristina came around to her side of the desk and squinted through the eyepiece.