The couple asked for a full nuptial Mass, and he gave them one, commandeering a table for an altar. The ceremony, which the villagers, starved for diversion, considered more an entertainment than a religious rite, was held outdoors. Afterward, the altar cloth was removed, the table reverting to its original function. Platters of fresh tortillas and dried beef seasoned with a hot sauce made by the bride’s mother were laid on it, along with delicacies and drinks from Mesa Verde’s dark little store: plastic tubs of Japanese instant noodles, potato chips, Coca-Cola, cans of Tecate. Riordan turned down the junk food (Lisette congratulated him for setting the example) but, abandoning his fast for this occasion, gorged on the tortillas and beef. He accepted a beer, which he drank with the fathers of the bride and groom under a madrone tree, its smooth, red-barked branches writhing like tentacles. Chimneys and cooking fires leaked smoke, dogs lay in the dust, chickens waddled by. The massive cliffs looming over the settlement took on the color of melted butter in the midafternoon light.
With his contentment restored, Riordan felt like taking a siesta, but Lisette pressed him into service, hauling her medical supplies and equipment from the truck. She started a generator for electric power, plugged in the ultrasound machine, and conducted a sort of health fair beneath a ramada roofed with sticks, showing a pregnant woman an image of her baby, passing out gift bags of beans and machaca and bananas, lecturing on their benefits and the evils of Coke and potato chips. She dispensed aspirin and swabbed ears and treated a small boy for a respiratory ailment, instructing his mother about how to administer the medication.
A vaquero arrived in a battered truck carrying a burro, a calf, and a goat. He walked up to the ramada with a rolling gait, watched the proceedings for a while, and then said that there were many sick children in a Tarahumara village farther up in the Sierra, where he’d been looking for loose cattle. The kids were coughing worse than this one, he added, gesturing at the boy. Some were gasping for breath.
“Probably what this kid has, syncytial virus,” Lisette said. She turned to the vaquero. “Can you guide us to these Tarahumara?”
“Yes,” he answered confidently. “A lot of narcos up there, but it will not be a problem. They know me.”
“How far is it?”
“Not too far,” he said. “We can drive most of the way, then we have to walk or ride a burro.”
“Damn. I wanted to be out of these mountains by dark.” Lisette traded looks with Riordan. “No way I could make it back before nightfall.”
“‘We,’ you mean. You’re not going by yourself,” he said, thinking of what Father Batista would have done.
Lisette stowed her equipment in the pickup, stuffed water bottles and packets of Virazone into a backpack, and left with Riordan in the vaquero’s truck, banging and slamming for perhaps twenty minutes until they came to a ciénaga beyond a village called San Tomás. The vaquero, whose name was Esteban, off-loaded his burro, saddled it, and gallantly offered it to la señora. Lisette slung her backpack over the saddle horn and mounted, and they sloshed across the ciénaga, spoiling an egret’s careful stalk.
On the other side, they continued up a stock trail. Esteban trudged in front of the burro, Riordan behind, huffing in the thin air. Cool as it was, he worked up a sweat. Half an hour later, in a narrow, rock-sided defile, the burro raised its tail and dropped a load of green horse apples. Turning as he stepped aside, Riordan recoiled and almost yelped as his eyes met the motionless eyes of a human head set in a niche illuminated by guttering vigil candles. Coarse black hair matted the skull; a mustache bristled under a blunt nose. More than a head, it was a partial torso, the broad shoulders clad in white cloth. The cry that had started in his throat died there, with the realization that he was looking at a plaster bust of Jesús Malverde, the mythical bandit who had become a saint in the narcos’ pantheon. Coins, small wooden rosaries, and other offerings had been laid around the idol. Recognizing that it was nothing more than a sculpture did not completely dissolve Riordan’s terror; it lingered, like the terror of a nightmare after awakening. The object’s placement, there in that dim, constricted passage, seemed like a macabre warning. He walked on feeling an uneasy alertness.
The trail led down into a mosaic of meadows and trees. Through bare stalks that sprouted in one of the meadows, he saw fifty-five-gallon drums ranked against a tin shed partly concealed in a pine thicket. Smoke curled out of a stovepipe in its roof, and a breeze from its direction carried with the resinous scent of pine an alien, industrial stink that heightened his apprehension, though he couldn’t say why.
His ignorance was dispelled in a moment. Lisette reined in the burro and stood in the stirrups, looking toward the shed.
“Did you know that was here?” she said to Esteban, a hint of alarm in her voice.
“Sí, señora.”
“Lisette, is that what I think it is?” Riordan asked in English.
Turning to him, she nodded. “A poppy plantation, and that shed is a heroin refinery. That smell? Like ammonia? Poppy sap being boiled down into morphine.” She said to Esteban, “Why didn’t you tell us they were making heroin up here?”
“I did tell you. A lot of narcos. It is not a problem. They know me.”
“But they don’t know us.”
“I am well known here, señora,” Esteban repeated. “It is not a problem.”
But it was, despite his fame. Nor, it seemed, had his notoriety spread to the two men who roared up from below on an ATV, pistols in their waistbands.
“Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing here?” the driver asked, making it clear that there could be no right answer to the second question.
Esteban, giving his name, explained that he was guiding these people, a doctor and a priest, to the Tarahumara village, where there were many sick children.
The driver said nothing. His sidekick said nothing. They stared with the concentration of the predators they were, then swung off the ATV. Riordan thought that the Brotherhood had hired them for their menacing looks alone. The driver wore a walrus mustache, his eyebrows formed a single black line, as if someone had scrawled a Magic Marker across his forehead, and the onyx eyes below them were as hard and shiny as buttons. The other man’s face was gaunt, a famished face, the skin stretched so thin that the outline of his skull was visible.
The driver braced Esteban against the ATV and patted him down. (Professionally, Riordan noticed; the guy had probably been a cop, and maybe still was, this being Mexico.) While Gaunt One kept an eye on Esteban, Mustache searched Lisette’s backpack, pulling out the cardboard packets of the antiviral drug.
“What is this?”
She told him: medication for the sick children.
Taking two or three quick steps toward the ATV, he tossed the backpack inside.
“What are you doing?” Lisette cried.
He ignored her and said, looking first at her, then at Riordan, “Oye, a doctor and priest. So you must be the North Americans from San Patricio. Señora Moreno and the priest they call Padre Tim.” He pronounced it “Teem.”
“Seems like they know who we are after all,” Riordan murmured to Lisette in English. He did not mention that he found this knowledge disturbing.
“What did you say to her?” Mustache demanded.
“We’re surprised you know us,” Riordan answered.
“Who gave you permission to come here?”
“No one,” Lisette said.
“So you do not have permission.”
“We were not aware that we needed permission,” said Riordan.
“You do. Now you are aware.”
“Who do we ask for this permission?”
“If you don’t know, find out. This is as far as you go. Turn around.”
Lisette protested: There were sick children in the village! Mustache replied that she was not to concern herself with the sick children; he would see to it that they got the medicine. She hopped off the burro and faced him.
“Are you a doctor? You don’t know what to do!” She jabbed a finger at the backpack, on the floor of the ATV. “Give that to me!”
Her temerity astonished Riordan but amused Mustache. At any rate, he smiled, though there was something in the smile that said it was temporary. A nation of sheep and wolves, Riordan thought. Now, confronted by two members of the ravening pack, he did not feel much like the shepherd. More like one of the sheep.
“Easy, Lisette,” he said, touching her shoulder, making sure he spoke in Spanish. “We’d better do what he says.”
Mustache commended his wisdom, and warned that he better not see them again without their permission slip. Looking at a cowed Esteban, he added: “That goes for you, too, Señor Vaquero.”
The trio headed back down the trail, Lisette leading the burro by the reins, muttering that she was fed up with these goddamned narcos with their guns and arrogance. Riordan didn’t speak; it had occurred to him that he wasn’t a helpless little lamb after all. He was an angry little lamb. He began counting silently each time his left foot hit the ground. One pace equaled about five feet. Six hundred paces equaled approximately one kilometer. He made note of the terrain and the trail’s general direction; with some turns north or south, it ran eastward from the ciénaga, which, he determined when they reached it, was about four kilometers from the refinery. The odometer and speedometer on Esteban’s truck were broken, but Riordan was able to estimate its average speed, and he timed the drive to Mesa Verde at precisely eighteen minutes. Call it twenty to make the math easier. Around seven kilometers, making eleven altogether.
These simple observations and calculations renewed his confidence. He felt rather good, in fact. If you know something, say something. Now he knew something.