5.

Menchú knew Cardinal Fox wouldn’t be happy to learn where he and Sal had gone, or about Perry’s involvement, and he was right. Fox first lectured him over the phone in Flores, saying that he had been foolish to go on a mission in an unofficial capacity. He accused Menchú of doing so just to avoid the thirty-six-hour clock. Though even the cardinal understood that thirty-six hours wasn’t enough time to get to La Lágrima unobtrusively. And in time, Fox also agreed that they couldn’t just leave the archaeological crew dead in the jungle. It wasn’t humane. Everyone had been trying to do the right thing.

“Do you think you stopped this demon?” Fox said.

Menchú had a small debate with himself, decided that the truth was best.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

Even the cover-up story required only a small lie: that Sifuentes had not met them at the trailhead north of Flores, but given them instructions on how to get through the jungle themselves, including a stop at the camp they’d set up. So in the official telling, Menchú, Sal, and Perry had come upon the crew at La Lágrima already slaughtered. No one alive to tell them what happened. It was an international incident, requiring Sansone from Team Two to work with both Mexican and Guatemalan authorities in delivering the Vatican’s official positions on what had happened and why it had been Menchú who found the crew. Sansone landed on the idea that the Vatican, in this case, had simply been lending a hand in an academic’s scholarly research, never imagining that anything so horrible could happen. There was no reason for the authorities on either side of the border to doubt the narrative. Meanwhile, police in Guatemala questioned Menchú, Sal, and Perry, who corroborated the official story. They only needed to be careful not to mention that Sifuentes had met them where he had, and that they’d spent a day and a half in the jungle together. That was easy enough to do. There was a half day of quiet tension, of Menchú holding his breath, while the policeman who interviewed them sought for and found the driver who had taken them to the end of the road in the first place to make sure their story checked out. But it turned out that the driver agreed with their version of the story. Menchú suspected that maybe Sansone had bribed the driver, but this turned out not to be the case. According to the detective, the driver hadn’t been paying much attention at all. It was dawn; the driver was sleepy at the time; and he had given so many people so many rides that he was foggy on the details, beyond remembering that he’d given a priest a ride to the edge of the jungle a couple days ago. The detective chuckled a little when he told Menchú that.

“It’s like the beginning of a bad joke,” the detective said.

“Yes,” Menchú said, forcing himself to smile. “It happens to me a lot. I am often the beginning of a bad joke.”

Ha, ha, he thought to himself. Ha, ha.

The story made the papers in Guatemala and Mexico. The official line was that the prime suspects were drug runners. Perhaps gangs had been using the site as a stop to move drugs north toward the United States. Maybe a shipment had been passing through when the crew happened to be there. In any case, the authorities said, the crew had seen something they shouldn’t have, and paid for it. A few journalists and public commentators cried foul. It didn’t look quite like the normal gang violence, which usually left bodies only to send a message, and tended to dig mass graves otherwise. What kind of message would a gang be sending by killing a bunch of academics? The public conversation about it generated heat but no light. The authorities vowed to investigate further. And two days later, Menchú, Sal, and Perry were free to go.

They had not spoken much since the jungle. There had been too much to do, and Hannah’s last words, her explanation—if it had been an explanation, and not just another lie—felt too big to address. The silence swelled between them, like a blister after a burn. Sal tried, on the hotel balcony the night before she left, where she found Menchú at prayer with a small glass of rum. “Father, if it’s true what she said, about the world sinking …” There was no second half of the sentence.

“It changes nothing. Before, we saved people. We will save people now.”

“But if the angels made everything …” She trailed off again, and he understood why, or thought he did. The consequences seemed too vast to comprehend—yet what did they mean for her life? For his?

“What does it change?” Menchú asked. “If she is not lying, she still didn’t make the world. Only the part where we live. She calls herself an angel to confuse us.”

“I don’t know, Father.” Sal stared off into the hot, dark night. “The way she talked sounded a lot like Genesis, didn’t it? The world without form and void. Dividing dark from light, day from night. Land from sea. Before from after. What if we’re just an abandoned science project?”

“We’re not abandoned.”

“I know you believe that.”

“It’s not belief,” he said. “It’s faith. It’s a way of being: sheltered, grateful, humbled, and always striving.”

“Toward what? If she’s right—if we’re really abandoned, then what is the point?”

“Faith and work are how we make purpose. How we fulfill purpose.”

“I hear you,” she said, but he could tell she was still unsure. She did sit beside him, though, at the table, in the dark, while the moon rose.

Menchú saw Sal and Perry off at the airport in Guatemala City, then took his bag and headed outside, out of the new part of the terminal, through the older part, and into the scrum of shouting cab drivers and relatives holding signs at the airport’s exit. He waved down a friendly-looking man in a baseball cap and a plaid shirt, who drove Menchú to a corner a half mile away where the local buses—old school buses from the United States painted in bright colors and fixed with racks on the roof—were heading into the highlands. He boarded early, waited as the bus filled with women, men, children, while the ayudantes hauled their luggage and packages to the roof and tied them down with ropes and bungee cords.

The bus growled to life in a cloud of diesel fumes and headed out of the city, past apartment buildings, offices, and movie theaters, none of which had been there when Menchú was a kid. As the bus got out of the suburbs, headed up the highway, and gained altitude, though, the landscape changed. There were the mountains Menchú remembered, the dormant volcanoes. The farms laid out on the floors and steep walls of the valleys. Half the people who had started out on the bus with Menchú got off, other passengers had gotten on. Now there were no more factories by the side of the highway, no more industry at all. At a crossroads, young men jumped aboard the bus and tried to sell snacks—nuts, dried fruit, candy—as fast as possible before the bus took off again. The ayudantes handed down luggage from the roof, hauled more luggage up; they were still standing on the roof when the bus headed up the highway again, climbed down a ladder bolted to the back as the bus gained speed, and swung in through the emergency exit, the buzzer for which they’d disabled long ago. The speakers above Menchú’s head blared out ranchera music. A group of women got on the bus wearing clothes woven in bright, dizzying patterns. Menchú looked and remembered. He knew from their clothes what town the women came from. Who was married and who was not. Then, at last, there was that smell in the air. Earthy. Like straw and dirt, rich and tangy. Menchú realized he hadn’t smelled it since he left, but had never forgotten it. It opened a door in his memories he’d kept closed. It felt like he was recalling everything and everyone, all of his childhood spent in these highlands. An old woman in a mud-brick house playing marimba music on a battery-powered radio, nodding along by the light of a single candle. The taste of chicken in pepián. The rain pounding on the tin roof of the school, drowning out the teacher’s voice. The images played in his mind, and he wept.

Now the landscape was completely familiar to him. He looked at the mountains on the opposite side of the valley from the highway and realized he could have traced their profile from memory if he wanted. He was very close to the town where he’d grown up, and remembered how to get back.

He got off the bus where the highway intersected with a road he remembered as being dirt, paved near the highway with a thin layer of flattened garbage. But the road was paved for real now. He began walking until a pickup truck laden with passengers, but with room for him, beeped, and he handed the driver a coin and climbed into the back. There were electric lines running along the side of the road now. He knew where to get out again, five minutes later. But he almost didn’t recognize the place where he’d arrived.

All the houses were different. Newer. Not a single one made of mud brick. All were cinder block and plaster now. All the streets were paved. And the town was alive, more full of people than it had been when he had lived there. He walked through the streets to the central plaza, where the massacre had happened. It was still there, still the same cobblestones, though much cleaner. Where Menchú had stood when Hannah slit her own throat, a man in a T-shirt stood now, talking on a cell phone. In front of the church, a man was selling tamales from a cart. A row of trucks was waiting to take people deeper into the countryside.

People had come back after the massacre, after the war, Menchú realized. He didn’t know any of them. But they had brought his town back to life. They had made it better.

Yet there was the church, just as it had always been. Parts of it had been repaired, other parts were heading toward dilapidation, but it was standing as straight as ever. The doors were open, and he went inside.

He had remembered, in an abstract way, what Catholic churches in the Guatemalan highlands could be like, but being back, the details assailed him as if he’d never seen anything like it before. For even if the Spanish had subjugated the Maya, they knew they had to let the Mayan beliefs into the Church. So Christian and Mayan iconography mixed on the walls, on the altar at the head of the church. So there was a second altar in the middle of the church, and while the official altar was cold and empty, the altar in the middle was filled with flowers and burning candles, and a few people were kneeling before it and praying in their native language. And Menchú could feel a stirring in him, something new being born. He didn’t know what it was. But he understood that it was what he’d come for. A sense of freedom. A sense of how enormous the world had become to him. His own faith could grow to match it. Grow far beyond what he’d been taught in his training for the priesthood. Grow larger than the machinations of the Vatican that he’d been caught up in for so long. There was something much bigger out there. And Menchú wanted to find it.

“Father,” a voice said. It was an old woman in clothes of brilliant colors, from her head wrap to her dazzling dress. “Are you new to this church?”

“No,” Menchú said. “I grew up here.”

The old woman grinned. “Welcome back,” she said.