Brooding about Danielo’s sacrilege, Riordan swung from self-criticism (he had failed to change that sinner’s interior life) to an un-Christian thought (some people were beyond redemption) to an un-Christian emotion: rage. Alone in his room after Compline, when he should have been meditating, he would find himself wishing he were still a young middleweight so he could pound the fear of God into Danielo. And then he would swing back around to excoriating himself for harboring such an impious wish.
Preparations for Las Posadas, the procession of the Holy Family during the nine days before Christmas, saved him from further morbid reflections. There was a lot to do. Like a casting director, he auditioned couples who would play the innkeepers and listened to a young man and woman rehearsing for their roles as Mary and Joseph. He and Father Hugo met with the costume committee, the food committee, the decoration committee. He threw himself into these efforts, pitching in to string Christmas lights in the plaza. If he did not quite feel the joy he was supposed to feel in the season, he at least felt like a normal pastor in a normal parish in normal times. An illusion, but sometimes illusions were necessary merely to get through the day.
The pageant’s first night fell, as was the custom, on December 16. The marchers, bundled up against the cold, assembled in the plaza, satisfactorily festive in the lights that garlanded the trees and twined around the bandstand’s iron trellises like multicolored vines. Children lined up, carrying lanterns and wearing cast-off bed linens refashioned to simulate shepherds’ garb. Draped in blue and white robes, the woman portraying Mary mounted a donkey; Joseph, with a costume-shop beard strung from his ears, stood beside her.
Riordan and Father Hugo led the procession twice around the plaza as the marchers sang “Feliz Navidad” and carols familiar to everyone in what used to be called Christendom. They trooped up Calle Juárez to the house of Domingo and Delores Quiroga, who would play the innkeepers tonight. César and Marta Díaz were to assume the role tomorrow night. A different house each night until the climax on Christmas Eve.
The marchers halted and gathered around the pilgrims. Their breath plumed in the brisk night air; lanterns formed a flickering semicircle.
Joseph stepped up to the door and began to sing:
In the name of heaven,
Who will give lodging
To these pilgrims, weary
From walking the roads?
From inside, Domingo sang his response, his terrible voice provoking giggles:
This is not an inn
Get on with you,
I cannot open the door,
You could be a robber.
The back-and-forth was supposed to go on, Joseph identifying himself as a carpenter from Nazareth, the innkeeper, increasingly belligerent, refusing to open his door, until Joseph proclaimed that his wife was Mary, Queen of Heaven, and soon-to-be mother to the Divine Word. The innkeeper was then to relent and bid the couple to enter his house. As they did, the procession would follow them, everyone singing,
Enter holy pilgrims,
Receive not this poor dwelling
But my heart.
Tonight is for rejoicing,
For tonight we will give lodging
To the Mother of God the Son.
But that was not what happened. The argument between Joseph and the innkeeper was interrupted halfway through by the frantic whoop of a siren, stroboscopic flashes, a spotlight’s glare. A Federal Police SUV came up the street from the direction of the plaza and stopped a few yards short of the crowd. Behind it hulked a troop carrier crammed with soldiers, helmeted and bristling with weapons. A voice boomed from a bullhorn on the police car’s roof: “Return to your homes immediately! A curfew is in effect! Until further notice, you will stay inside your homes from six at night till six in the morning! Anyone violating the curfew will be subject to arrest!”
The marchers milled around in confusion, shielding their eyes from the spotlight. Small children began to wail. Somewhere, a woman called out, “Padre Tim! Padre Beltrán! Talk to them!” Right then, the soldiers piled out of the troop carrier and blocked the street, holding their rifles and gas-grenade launchers at high port.
“If you people do not disperse immediately, you will be arrested. Return to your homes now! And stay there!”
Riordan stiffened and started toward the police car. “Con calma, Padre Tim. Tranquilamente,” cautioned Father Hugo, laying a hand on his arm. Riordan shook it off gently, composed himself, and approached the car, making an awning with his hand against the blinding spotlight. The federale in the passenger seat swung his door open. The bullhorn’s microphone lay in his lap.
“Padre, you had better get these people off the street, or we will. You have three minutes.”
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded. “This is a Christmas pageant. It is not a demonstration.”
“Did you hear me? As of tonight, there will be a curfew from six to six, until further notice.”
“What for? We’re not doing anything illegal.”
“Now you’ve got two minutes,” the federale said; then, tempering his tone somewhat: “Look, I don’t want to arrest these people, but I will if I have to.”
Riordan sensed a kind of static electricity in the air, a crackling of dread.
“One minute and thirty seconds.”
“Let me have that,” he said, indicating the microphone.
* * *
Riordan’s illusions of normality underwent further demolition the following day. Squads of policemen and paratroopers ranged through town, barged into homes, and seized six or seven young men. No reasons were given for the arrests, no information as to where the prisoners had been taken. The next day, the acting mayor led a convoy of citizens toward the military base to protest; it was turned back at the roadblock, and the mayor himself arrested for his trouble. He was released within a few hours, but there was no word about the others.
Twenty-four hours later, a delegation of mothers and wives, swearing that their men were not narcos, fearing that they would join Mexico’s los desaparecidos—the disappeared—appealed to Riordan to intervene. The authorities would not listen to them or the mayor, but if they had Christian bones in their bodies, they might listen to a priest.
Although he doubted that Inspector Bonham’s bones had any religious affiliation, he made two tries to reach him on the burner phone, and got an answer on the third. What was going on? Curfews, arbitrary arrests that were nothing more than legalized kidnappings. Things were as bad as they had been at the height of the Brotherhood’s reign of terror.
“Not in the Christmas spirit, I agree,” Bonham said, and Riordan shot back that he didn’t think this was an occasion for sarcasm. He then ticked off the roster of missing detainees: Álvarez, Durán, Rodríguez, and four more. Where were they, and what were the charges against them?
“Be at the base in an hour,” Bonham answered, in a tone that left no room for discussion. “I’ll notify the roadblock to let you through and make sure you have gate clearance.”
Riordan quickly pulled off his Franciscan habit—the billowy garment could be hazardous on a motorcycle—and changed into his jeans and leather jacket. As he strode out to the Harley, recalling Father Hugo’s and the Old Priest’s warnings about foreigners who meddled in official state business, he wondered if he was being led into a trap. Maybe Captain Valencia, with Bonham’s acquiescence, if not his connivance, intended to arrest him. That seemed a paranoid fantasy, but in Mexico the fantastic often turned out to be real.
* * *
In his rush, he had forgotten his helmet. The cold air that slapped his face and whipped through his hair when he opened the throttle exhilarated him. His skin burned from the ride as he dismounted and was escorted through the gate by a paratrooper.
“A good-looking motorcycle,” the trooper said. “Leave it here. Nobody’s going to steal it.”
The base was larger than it appeared from the outside, about the size of a soccer field, and more intimidating, what with machine guns mounted on the armored vehicles and razor wire and dozens of soldiers and police officers in body armor. But he decided not to look cowed or apprehensive, and affected a swagger as his escort led him past a row of green wall tents to a low bungalow shaded by eucalyptus trees: Captain Valencia’s private quarters.
He and Bonham were seated inside on identical easy chairs, the inspector in plain clothes, Valencia in his field uniform, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows with military precision. There was a laptop on a table between them, and on the wall behind them, a painting of some nineteenth-century battle. Valencia’s greeting, while less than friendly, could not help but be more cordial than at their first meeting. He got up, shook hands, addressing his visitor as Padre Riordan instead of as “priest,” and praised the accuracy of his intelligence. The poppy field and the heroin lab were almost exactly where he’d reported them to be.
“We had gotten a tip about it,” he said in his lightly accented English. “You saved us a lot of trouble. It pleases me that you can do something more useful than spreading superstition.”
That was more in character, Riordan thought.
Bonham motioned at a folding chair facing him and the captain.
Valencia, resuming his seat, expelled a breath and said, “So, you have some complaints.” With a twirl of his hands, he invited Riordan to air them, which he did, feeling bold, more like the scrappy Irish kid he’d once been than a middle-aged friar. He pulled a list of names from his pants pocket and shoved it into Valencia’s hands.
“What is this?”
“Those are the men you have arrested. What for? Where are they? What have they been charged with? What’s the reason for the curfew? What gives you the idea that your men can break up a Christmas pageant and kick doors down and drag people off, like—”
“You’re not making a complaint, you’re conducting an interrogation,” the captain interrupted, and what little warmth there had been in his expression vanished. “We do that, not you.”
“About a week ago, I gave a sermon,” Riordan said. “I told my parishioners to cooperate with the army and the police, that it’s their duty not to be silent. I told them to have confidence in you, and now you do this. You behave like an army of occupation.”
An angry edge had infiltrated his voice, but Valencia was unmoved.
“The suspects aren’t here. We turned them over to the Federal Police.” He handed the list to Bonham, who didn’t bother to read it. “Perhaps the inspector can enlighten you as to their whereabouts.”
A cute little game, Riordan thought as he said, “Suspects? What are they suspected of?”
“We’ll get into that, but first you need to see one more entertaining video,” said Bonham, opening the laptop on the table. “It was posted this morning. We want you to see it before it goes viral, if it hasn’t already.”
Riordan heard again the mechanical, monotonous voice of Julián Menéndez, a.k.a. Ernesto Salazar, a.k.a. the Butterfly. Three minutes, twenty-four seconds later, he sat staring at a black screen, much of the boldness and swagger draining out of him as he tried to process what he’d seen in the brief, final sequence.
“My men,” said Valencia, his jaw tightening. “They went missing three days before your pageant. We found their bodies the next day, still in the chairs, with those cards hanging from their necks. We also found their SandCat, riddled with bullet holes, some distance from where we found them. Blood all over the seats.… You look perplexed, Padre.”
Riordan said he was. He hadn’t heard a whisper about this massacre.
“We have kept it secret. We did not want the press to get ahold of it. But now it’s very public.”
“But if they were killed in their SandCat…?”
Bonham spoke: “This is the cartel’s answer to the raid on the heroin refinery. But it’s also a kind of two-part propaganda video. The Brotherhood winning hearts and minds in part one, meting out justice in part two.”
“The medications they were passing out—”
“Exactamente!” said Bonham, making a stab with a finger. “The ones you told me were confiscated from Moreno. A windfall for the narcos, and they took advantage of it, showing what great guys they are, caring for the sick. And to prove what badasses they are, they staged the executions. Not one of those four troopers pulled the triggers that killed Díaz and Reyes. They weren’t even in the plaza the day of the demonstration. The whole thing was faked. A fake medical team handing out medicine, a fake execution.”
“You mean…?”
“Oh, no. Those were real bullets and real dead men. But did you notice anything unusual?”
Riordan snorted. “It’s unusual for me to watch a video of people being shot to death.”
“That isn’t what you saw. I’ll replay the last few seconds—”
“No, thank you.”
“All right. If I did, you would see that there isn’t any blood. Any fresh blood. When the camera holds on the bodies after the gunfire … not a drop of blood. You would also notice that their heads are tied to stakes behind the chairs. For the sake of verisimilitude.”
Riordan frowned in mute bewilderment.
“To make it look like they were alive. Those guys were already dead. Dead long enough to have bled out and for the blood to have dried and blended in with the camouflage pattern of their uniforms.”
“It was a trap,” Valencia spat out. Leaning back, he crossed his arms, the muscles in them like thin steel cables. “You see, we got another tip, also anonymous, that there was another poppy field up there. I sent the squad to check it out. They drove into an ambush on the Mesa Verde road, and then their bodies were taken somewhere else and tied up in the chairs and shot to make it look like they had been captured and executed.”
“Salazar could have videoed the bodies after the ambush, but that wouldn’t be half as dramatic as showing an execution,” Bonham elaborated. “Their bodies were props.”
Seated between the two men, Riordan swiveled his head from one to the other, like a spectator at a tennis match.
“But there is another possibility,” Valencia said. He set his lips into a straight line. “Someone else ambushed my troops, maybe a rival gang. The Brotherhood discovered the bodies and saw an opportunity to make use of them.”
“Another windfall,” Bonham added. “But that theory is pretty far-fetched. The simplest explanation is usually the right one, and the simplest explanation for this bloodbath is that the Brotherhood did it.”
“The question being, Who in the Brotherhood? Who pulled the triggers?” Valencia turned aside and, reaching across the table, plucked the list from Bonham’s lap.“So you have these names…”
Riordan rediscovered his voice: “They couldn’t have done it. I know those men. One of them—Durán—is a college student home on vacation. They’re not narcos, and they’re certainly not sicarios.”
“Possibly you are right. But we think that they might know something—”
“And we’re trying to convince them to say something,” Bonham interjected.
“You have your list, I want mine, Padre Riordan,” Valencia went on, with venomous calm. “I want to know, who was this informant who gave the false tip? I want the names of the men who butchered mine. If I have to arrest everybody in your parish to find out, I will.”
“Do you want to know what that will accomplish, Captain? Zero.”
“Then should I arrest and question you?” Valencia jeered. “Maybe you know who butchered my troops?”
“Of course not!” Riordan shot back. “I would be the first to tell you if I did.”
Which, he realized in the brief silence that followed, had not been the best choice of words.
“How do I know you would? At our last conversation, you told me there are certain kinds of knowledge you must keep to yourself.”
“I can tell you this much: no one has said anything about this to me.”
“And if someone does?” The captain dropped his gaze and rubbed his temples, as if he had a migraine. “Without more precise information, what choice do I have except to arrest ten, arrest a hundred to find one?” He extended a pack of Marlboros. “Smoke?”
Riordan shook his head. The offer signaled that discussions would continue. But no one spoke. He understood that he was expected to.
“If I gave you a name,” he said hesitantly, “would you agree to lift the curfew and release your so-called suspects before Christmas?”
Bonham let out a humorless laugh. “A quid pro quo! You’re learning!”
“That’s a lot to trade for one name,” Valencia said. He lit his cigarette and squinted against the smoke curling into his eyes, giving himself a sleepy, hooded look. “It would have to be the name of a big fish. No plankton. No minnow.”
“This man works for the Brotherhood. He’s not a big fish, but he’s more than plankton—or a minnow.”
“What then? A snapper? A grouper?”
Ichthyological fine points were not Riordan’s strength. He went with snapper, which Valencia rejected as a species too insignificant to warrant what was being asked of him. They negotiated for a while. Riordan felt as if he’d been taken over by an alien personality who was nonetheless himself, a heretofore hidden sharer in his existence, a doppelgänger. If in the seminary someone had predicted that he would one day be haggling over men’s fates as if he were in a carpet bazaar, he would have thought it more likely that he’d be chosen as the first priest to fly into space.
Valencia relented a little: depending on the quality of Riordan’s disclosure, he would consider lifting the curfew, but only until the day after Christmas. The holiday fell on a Tuesday, not quite a week from now. The suspects could be released by, say, Saturday.
They need time to clean them up, Riordan thought, and to hide or heal their bruises. He asked, “How can I be sure you’ll hold up your end of the bargain?”
“You can’t be—this is Mexico,” Bonham answered, with another mirthless laugh, which Valencia echoed with one of his own. “Who is the snapper?”
“Jesús Delgado,” Riordan answered. He wanted, in the deepest part of his being, to say “Danielo García,” but Danielo was off-limits, protected by the seal of the confessional. Delgado, however, was fair game.
“Tell us about this Jesús,” Bonham said.
“He’s a famous rapist of teenage girls.”
“We don’t investigate rapists,” Valencia said, disgust in his voice. “What does he do for the Brotherhood? What makes you think he’ll do us any good?”
“He drives mota to the border, along with the mules to carry it over. He lives in Mesa Verde, and he’s as familiar with the Mesa Verde road as anyone. He might know something about the ambush. It’s possible he was in on it.”
“I don’t know, Padre Riordan. I don’t know about this Delgado,” Valencia said in a mocking singsong. “Sounds like not much of a fish to me. But you know what, priest? I’ll take your offer, bad as it is.”
Bonham was giving Riordan his invasive, mind-reading stare. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep our word,” he said. “Like I told you, I take care of my assets.”
Which, Riordan grasped, was the reason why they had agreed to the uneven exchange. They wanted to keep him on board.
* * *
“We don’t want to get sidetracked,” the Professor said after Riordan left.
Valencia lit another cigarette, letting the smoke drift slowly out of his mouth so that it veiled his bare-boned face. “From what?” he said as the veil lifted.
“The mission.”
“How are we being sidetracked from the mission?”
“This idea you have to find the names of the sicarios who staged the ambush. You have almost no chance of that. Salazar would like nothing better than to have us off chasing a wild goose instead of a butterfly.”
“Sixty thousand people have been murdered in this country in only six years. To put the best face on it, perhaps five percent of those crimes have been solved. You cops are experts on not finding out names. That’s why you think there is almost no chance.”
Valencia sprang from his chair, yanked a scrapbook from a desk drawer, and dropped it into the Professor’s lap. Pasted into it were press clippings, with tabloid-gory photographs and headlines crying, JOURNALIST ASSASSINATED IN NOGALES or variations thereof. One article elaborated: “Raúl Valencia, 31 years of age, a reporter for the magazine Proceso, was shot to death on Tuesday morning…”
The captain waited for the headlines to sink in, then snatched the scrapbook back, as if the Professor’s hands would contaminate it. He fell back into his chair and took another drag, again letting the dense blue cloud drift slowly from his lips; it looked like smoke rolling from under the door of a burning room.
“The police did a very thorough investigation,” he said. “Yes, an excellent investigation. They collected the bullet casings—five nine-millimeters. They determined that the rounds were armor-piercing, because they passed through the door of my brother’s automobile as if it were paper. They also determined that the sicario was a professional—the rounds entered in a tight group under the door handle.”
The Professor nodded, having, early in his career with Joaquín Carrasco, eliminated a couple of snitches in exactly that fashion.
“The police interviewed eyewitnesses,” Valencia continued. “Of course no one saw a thing, except one. He said the assassin was riding a motorcycle, a blue Kawasaki, and that he pulled up alongside my brother at a traffic light. My poor brother, he was not like most Mexicans: he believed a traffic light was a command, not a suggestion, and for his obedience his reward was death. The police concluded that the assassin knew about my brother’s habit of stopping at traffic lights, that he knew the route Raúl followed when he picked up his daughter at the school. My niece, Andrea. And, oh yes, they even found the gun! The sicario had tossed it onto the street as he sped away—a Beretta—and they discovered that it had been purchased at a gun store in Arizona. This is efficient police work, wouldn’t you say? Please, give me your expert opinion.”
The Professor had fallen into an impassive mood. “Come on, Alberto, I see what you’re—”
“But then the police showed what they are best at, without parallel. They found no one! Not a single suspect. No names, Inspector Bonham. Not one! The case dissolved. Which is what happens to ninety-nine out of one hundred murders in this country. I think I can do better. I will do better. I will find the names. I will find the bastards they belong to.”
The Professor listened patiently, and restrained himself from telling Valencia that his opinion of the army was as low as Valencia’s of the police. “We’re here to capture Salazar,” he said in a tranquil tone. “This has nothing to do with your brother.”
The captain raised his eyebrows. “But it has everything to do with him! We paratroopers are also a brotherhood. Those four men butchered for entertainment were my brothers. And I will lose the respect of their brothers, my troops, if I fail to do something about it.”