“My grandmother says Jews came to New Mexico in the old days. They kept to themselves and practiced old customs. They didn’t eat pork but sometimes they slaughtered a pig and hung it outside the house so no one would suspect. As time went by they began to forget that the reason they kept the old ways was because they were Jews.”
“Did you grow up in Bernalillo?”
“Yes. I’ve lived there all my life.”
“Do you know the Santos family?”
“I know Isabel went to California. I know Chuy likes to gamble. I know Manuel is a lawyer who lives in Placitas. The Republican party is preparing to run him for the State House.”
Claire hadn’t heard that. “Tell me about the hand you found. Did it lead to a body?”
“Yes. The OMI forensic anthropologists dug it out. They can tell how long it was buried there.”
“Was anything else found?”
“Just the skeleton.”
“Would the OMI consider turning it over to the Smithsonian? They have the best resources for establishing how old it is and where it came from.”
“Usually the OMI handles the old bones themselves. There’d have to be something special for them to call in the Smithsonian.”
“The document Isabel found makes this case special.”
“It might if we had a document,” Romero pointed out.
“You could begin by asking the Smithsonian to examine and date the cross,” Claire said. “I don’t know of anyone in New Mexico with the ability to do that.” She was trying to capture the interest of the archaeologist in Romero.
“I’ll talk to Lieutenant Kearns about it,” he said.
“Maybe the old bones can tell us something about the more recent death.”
“Bones make good witnesses. They never lie. But I have to tell you that Tony Atencio is looking pretty good to us right now. We picked up some prints and fibers at the crime scene. We’ll see if we can get a match.”
******
It was eight when he left. Claire wondered if it was too early to call August but she went ahead knowing that most older people slept little and woke early.
He answered so quickly his hand might have been resting on the phone waiting for a call. “Claire,” he said, clearing his throat with the hoarseness of a smoker, although he claimed he hadn’t smoked for years. “How are you, my dear? Was that your Isabel Santos who was killed in Bernalillo?”
“I’m afraid so,” Claire said.
“The news reports say that she walked in on a theft. Do you know what happened to your document?”
“Not yet.”
“It wasn’t in the house?”
“The police haven’t found it.”
“A robber would never know its worth. Could she have sold it before this happened?”
“It’s possible, but who would she have sold it to?”
“Some rogue collector. UC Berkeley. Unlike other universities we know, Berkeley will do whatever it can to keep scholars happy.” He cleared his throat again, more for effect than from necessity.
Claire had been thinking theft, but she supposed it was possible that Isabel had sold the document. If so the buyer should come forward. The money should have been deposited somewhere which would be easy for the police to establish.
“There’s more,” she said. “A skeleton was found under Isabel’s house near where the cross and document were. The OMI’s forensic anthropologists are investigating.”
“That raises all sorts of intriguing possibilities especially if the skeleton brought the cross and document to Bernalillo.”
“It does,” Claire agreed. “Is there anything in the documents you verified that might be helpful to me or the investigators?”
“There’s a lot about the persecution of the Rodriguez family. Whether it would be helpful or not, I don’t know.”
“Would you be willing to make copies of the relevant documents for me?”
“Of course. I’ll put them in the mail today.”
“Thank you,” Claire said.
“My pleasure,” August replied.
Chapter Six
THE DOCUMENTS WERE WAITING FOR CLAIRE when she got home after work on Friday. Her house was stifling after baking in the sun all day. She let the cat out, turned on the cooler and microwaved a bowl of leftover pasta for dinner. Then she took August’s documents outside to her courtyard. Her house had a small backyard with a long view across the city and the Rio Grande Valley to the West Mesa. The sunsets were a glorious play of shadow and light but the view could be too vast. Claire felt her thoughts might float into the far away spaces and never return. For concentration she preferred the enclosed space of her courtyard. There were times when she enjoyed hiding behind the courtyard’s high walls which reminded her of a medieval cloister. She had a datura plant that had volunteered to live on one side of her courtyard. On the other she had planted an herb garden of rosemary, sage and oregano.
She sat down on the banco, opened August’s package and found a note from him saying that he had spoken to the Inquisition scholar Peter Beck and that Beck doubted Joaquín Rodriguez had ever written the document Claire described.
According to Beck it was well documented that Joaquín Rodriguez had converted and been garroted. Claire returned August’s note to the envelope. Just like a scholar, she thought, to deny the existence of something that might contradict his scholarship. She didn’t know Peter Beck, but she knew other scholars and she knew how committed they became to the positions that earned them their reputation.
Having dispensed with scholars, Claire turned to the photocopies of the documents written in the ornate penmanship of the sixteenth century. Flowery language matched the elegant handwriting. Her Spanish was good enough for a short document but too laborious for a long one. Fortunately August had enclosed the translations he had used in his authentication process. Authenticity was established by dating the paper and the ink and by comparing these documents to other official documents. One needed to know the content to do an effective comparison. It was hard for Claire to imagine people spending their time faking Inquisition documents, but she knew that forgers would fake anything they thought they could sell.
As she read the translations Claire learned that there had been three Rodriguez siblings: Joaquín, Raquel, and a younger brother named Daniel. The records of the Inquisition of Joaquín and Raquel were enclosed. There was no record of Daniel’s fate, leading Claire to wonder if he had escaped the Inquisition. Perhaps he had been a less fervent Jew or a more convincing Catholic. No Spaniard was allowed to emigrate to the New World without at least pretending to be a good Catholic. Some came with the hope that they could abandon the pretense as they moved further away from the Church.
As Claire read on she learned that the Rodriguez family was accused of Judaizing by a neighbor in Mexico City. Once people were accused the Inquisitors were quick to incarcerate them and confiscate their property. The only way the accused could save themselves was to convince the Holy Office of the Inquisition that they had repented and embraced the Church. Although they were both tortured on the rack, neither Raquel nor Joaquín repented. Both were convicted of apostasy and “relaxed to the secular arm,” meaning they were turned over to the civil authorities for public execution. Raquel was burned alive at the stake.
Joaquín was accused of “making jokes about Our Lord Jesus Christ and insulting Our Lady.” Although he was a baptized and confirmed Catholic, he reverted to his family’s Jewish beliefs “like a dog who returns to his vomit.”
Joaquín responded that he obeyed only the Law of Moses. His God “cares for me in the desert in the land of burning heat, and brings water, honey and oil from the rock. He will welcome me into heaven with strumming harp and clicking castanets. Starve me, break my body on the rack, but my faith remains gold in the treasure chest of my mind.”
He was sentenced to be led “through the streets on a saddled horse with a crier telling of his crime.” Someone in the crowd stepped f
orward and Joaquín spoke words that were interpreted as a conversion. When he arrived at the marketplace of San Hipólito, he was garroted until he died, and then his body was taken to the quemadero—the burning ground—put on the fire and burned to ashes.
Claire liked to believe the words dame el fuego were truly Joaquín’s last words and wishes. The Joaquín she’d just read about wouldn’t have converted out of fear of the fire. The elegant handwriting and the poetic language described a barbaric act, one of many that had been committed in the name of somebody’s God.
The light had faded in the courtyard. Claire looked up and saw the red glow of the planet Mars hanging over the Rio Grande Valley. Tonight was the dark of the moon and there was nothing in the sky to diminish Mars’s light. The red planet, considered the ruler of war, action and aggression, was at its closest point to earth in many years. Claire knew mankind was capable of vicious acts. However, blood spilled in the heat of passion and war, blood spilled over lust or fear or territory, was more understandable to her than blood spilled in a cold and calculated public execution. It took time for the Holy Office of the Inquisition to try and execute the lapsed Catholics. At any time in the long process the Inquisitors could have shown compassion and tolerance, but they never did. The Inquisition continued for centuries in the Old World and the New. In Claire’s mind it was one of Christianity’s darkest chapters. Her heart was with the passionate Joaquín Rodriguez who had wanted nothing more than to worship his God.
Her cat, Nemesis, startled her by jumping off the courtyard wall and landing in the herb garden, releasing the fragrance of oregano and rosemary. He meowed and rubbed against her legs indicating he wanted to go in.
Claire took him inside, sat down on the sofa in her living room, and turned on the light. Along with the Inquisition documents, August had sent copies of prints depicting the Inquisition of Raquel Rodriguez. With her breasts bare she was dragged in front of her black-robed, black-hatted Inquisitors. She was burned at the stake dressed in a sambenito, the yellow cloak and pointed hat Jews were forced to wear. The executioners’ faces were well hidden by black hoods as they fed the flames. It was a horrifying image, not one Claire wanted to take to bed with her.
She looked through the documents again trying to find something in the elegant wording to erase the image of Raquel being burned at the stake, something trivial or stupid or even humorous. There was a kind of black humor in the wording of the documents. She found her diversion at the end of the “Inquisition Case of Joaquín Rodriguez” but it wasn’t particularly humorous. The document concluded with a list of witnesses to the execution. She’d skipped over the list earlier thinking the names had no significance. This time, however, one name leapt out at her from the list, the name of Manuel Santos. He was one of the grim, sanctimonious, black-robed men who had watched Joaquín Rodriguez burn to cinder. And this was the name of Isabel Santos’s brother.
Claire put down the document and began pacing from one end of her house to the other, wearing a path through the gray carpet. Nemesis watched from the sofa flicking his tail. She had wondered if the skeleton under the bricks was a Rodriguez who had come north with Joaquín’s last words hidden inside a cross, possibly even with the Oñate expedition. It was a wise time for a Jew to escape Old Mexico. Claire had never considered that the bones could belong to an Inquisitor or the family of an Inquisitor. It was possible that Joaquín’s encounter on the way to the stake was not as it was described in the Inquisition record. It was possible that the Church hadn’t been able to convert Joaquín Rodriguez and had garroted him to save face, in which case the Inquisitors would not want his last words to be known. Had the record keepers, too compulsive to destroy them, buried them on the frontier?
Joaquín’s Inquisition had happened over four hundred years ago. Would anyone care about having an Inquisitor as an ancestor at this point? Usually villainous relatives became less evil and more picturesque as time went by. But Inquisitors were a special class of evil. Did the Santos brothers know they were descended from one?
Those weren’t thoughts that led to a good night’s sleep, either. Claire went to her office and turned on the computer, thinking that writing her thoughts down could help her get rid of them. As she typed, she thought about the deep, dark evil of the Inquisition, an evil that had sprung from one of the most harmonious periods in history. Prior to the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain, the Iberian Peninsula had experienced an incredible flowering in the arts and the sciences. The scientific achievements and art that came from that period were remarkable. Claire thought about the symmetry and beauty of the Alhambra. She remembered sitting in the tiled courtyard with Pietro Antonelli, eating oranges, listening to the tinkling fountain.
If there was anything that could take her mind off the Santos and Rodriguez families, it would be Pietro. There was the risk that he wouldn’t remember her or wouldn’t answer her but if she didn’t write him she would consider herself a coward. The dark of the moon marked the end of one phase, which led to the beginning of another. The red glow of Mars encouraged action. She typed the E-mail she had been composing in her head, trying to keep it brief and to the point. She told Pietro about her grown children—Eric was working in California, Robin studying in Boston—her divorce from Evan, her new life in Albuquerque. She said her work had recently caused her to think about Spain and North Africa and to wonder how he was. Before she could reconsider all the reasons why she shouldn’t do what she wished to do, she typed his E-mail address and hit the send button.
Chapter Seven
SHE WOKE UP EARLY WONDERING WHAT TIME it would be in Florence. Before she heated a bagel, made a cup of coffee, or drank a glass of orange juice, she checked her E-mail to see if there was a response. Nothing but the usual collection of porn and credit card offers. She began to realize how big a step she had taken with one small E-mail. Would it condemn her to look for an answer first thing in the morning, last thing at night and every hour in between? It wasn’t the first time she felt like a teenager when it came to middle-aged romance. She had been in her late teens when she met Pietro, but in some ways she was more mature about love then than she was now, more secure about her looks and more optimistic about her ability to love and be loved back.
To convince herself that she wasn’t obsessed with getting a reply, she decided to do some work while she was online. She poured a glass of juice, returned to the computer, went to the Albuquerque Journal’s website and typed in the name of Manuel Santos. The most recent article came up on the screen. Manuel made a statement expressing his sorrow at his sister’s death and declaring that the state needed to get tougher on crime. Claire scrolled through earlier articles, learning that he had been in the news for years in a small way. He was a partner at a large, well-known law firm, and an active member of the Republican party. When a prominent Republican came to town, Manuel Santos was at the politician’s side. When there was a fund-raiser for the party, Manuel was there. He was prodevelopment, anti-government spending, not particularly concerned with protecting the environment. There were photos with his attractive blonde wife and two adorable children. Manuel and his family lived in the hills of Placitas, where subdivisions with large lots looked down on the Interstate, the fast food strip of Route 44, the Santa Ana Casino, and the town of Bernalillo. Santos was the type of Republican with Hispanic roots that the party had been courting. Claire wondered if he’d also be willing to turn his back on his roots.
She checked her E-mail one more time, then logged off the Internet. After breakfast she called May Brennan.
“Hullo.” May answered the phone in a voice that had a dull echo like it came from an emotional cellar.
She was getting a divorce and Claire knew what a miserable experience that was. She could also sympathize with any guilt felt about the death of Isabel Santos.
“May,” she said. “This is Claire Reynier. Are you all right?”
“I’ve been better. And you?”
Been worse, Clai
re thought, remembering the dark days of her own divorce. “I’m all right, but I’m upset about the death of Isabel Santos.”
“Me, too. I gave her your name. I gather she came to see you?”
“She did. Are you free for lunch?”
“I was planning to work at the Historical Society today, but I could take a break.”
“The Range?” It was Bernalillo’s best-known restaurant.
“Not there. Too busy. Too noisy. There’s a new microbrewery called Milagro on Route 44 just before the Santa Ana Casino. Can you meet me there at noon?”
“Okay,” Claire said.
She allowed herself to check her E-mail just once more. Nothing from Pietro.
******
May was sitting at the table sipping a beer when Claire arrived at Milagro. The brewery was at ground level. The dining room was on the second floor. It was large and bright with brick walls painted white and an IMAX view of the Sandias. Cedar trunks went from the floor of the brewery to the roof, making the dining room feel like a tree house.
May was alone, but Claire had the sense that the gray moth of depression sat beside her, a companion that could drive all others away. Sometimes people had to isolate themselves in order to recover from a wound. Most people healed eventually and got back in circulation again. Reaching out to Pietro was a sign that Claire had finally healed from her divorce. But some people’s wounds went too deep to ever heal. It was too soon to tell with May. Claire knew her ex-husband was a drinker who had been rude and abusive. He berated May publicly about her weight.
May wore no makeup, not even a touch of blush. The bright light at Milagro didn’t flatter her pasty skin. Her hair was long and gray and piled carelessly on top of her head. She didn’t get up when she saw Claire. Claire bent down and gave her a hug, noticing that May felt thick and lumpy as a pillow stuffed with straw.
“Good to see you, May,” she said.
“You’re looking well,” May replied.
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