The Hot Country

7

There was a high-voiced racket all around, the zopilotes in their twilight wrangling over their spots on the roof edges and on the bell tower and even on the high cross itself, where they would settle down to sleep. But when I turned the far corner, at Calle de Vicario, and faced along the street at the south side of the church, some different, agitated voices joined the din. Fifty yards ahead was a little gaggle of women hovering around something or someone on the pavement that I couldn’t see. I strode on, expecting, briefly, to find a plugged fellow gringo, probably in uniform. But even before I arrived, I’d adjusted that expectation. The Veracruzanas wouldn’t be making over an American like this.

I gently elbowed the women into opening a space for me, and I was right about the victim. It was not an American. It was a Mexican priest in a black cassock. He was lying flat on his back on the pavement, his right arm straight up in the air, and he was grasping his right wrist hard. The palm of his hand had a major bloody hole blown in it and it had already sent the priest into shock. Or, to take up the likely point of view of everyone on the street but me, it had sent him into a state of religious ecstasy: He was staring at the hole and talking to it, saying over and over, “I’m martyred. I’m martyred. By the wounds of Christ I’m martyred.”

I almost pointed out the obvious to everyone assembled: His stigmata was actually from a rifle slug. But I figured most of these assembled señoras already knew that. I looked over my shoulder and up to the roof of the two-story row building across the street, where the sniper must have fired his two shots. If he was still up there, I figured I’d be next. But I didn’t see anybody. Two shots to the priest and that was it, it seemed. I looked back at the padre. He was a slick-haired, corpulent, middle-aged man, and he was still clutching and waving his wounded hand and proclaiming his Christ-like suffering. The woman next to me said it was a miracle. I thought she was talking to herself and about the bleeding palm. But she was talking to me and she was about to answer the question that was now in my mind. She nudged me and bent to the priest and lifted the massive gold cross that hung on a chain around his neck, even as the priest yammered on, unaware of her.

The cross had been plugged right at the intersection of the upright and the crossbar. This was heavy gold plate. The Mauser slug had buried itself in the metal and it no doubt knocked him on his ass, probably right after the shot to his hand. Under his cassock he’d have another memento that I was sure he’d figure out how to exploit: the image of the crucifix imprinted on his chest in black and blue. The cross saved the priest’s life, but it wasn’t a miracle. The guy on the roof clearly knew what he was doing: sending a message. If this shooter wanted the priest dead, the priest would be dead.

I was taking all this in pretty quick, but meanwhile the priest was doing more than claiming martyrdom. He was bleeding. I knelt beside him. He had a hemp rope wrapped around his cassock as a belt. I undid it and pulled it off him. “Did someone go to find a doctor?” I asked the ladies.

“Yes. Yes, señor,” a couple of them said.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” I said, and I took hold of his lifted arm. He did not resist. He turned his face to me as I wrapped the rope around his forearm above the wrist.

“Did you see who shot you?” I asked him.

He just stared at me.

I cinched the rope tight and laid the arm across his chest. He kept it there and seemed ready just to pass out for a while.

I looked at the women gathered around me, seeing in their eyes that moment you learn to sense, the moment of the most trust you’re going to get from people you want to get information out of. “Did any of you see the shooter?” I asked.

I got a little chorus of No, señor with a trailing No vi nada or two. They’d all seen nothing. As they spoke, I scanned the dark, round faces wrapped in their rebozos, and I noticed one woman, indeterminately old but older than the rest, who didn’t say a word. As I looked her in her eyes, they shifted away. She was the one who knew something.

I needed to make another gesture. I looked at the priest, whose head had lolled to the side on the pavement. “We should make him comfortable,” I said. “May I have something for his head?”

One of the women crossed herself and unwrapped her rebozo and rolled it and kneeled next to me. She lifted the priest’s head very gently and slid the cloth beneath it. Though I was interested in the tenderness of her gesture and how she might have always longed to touch him like this, I put that aside, and instead, I looked up at the silent woman, who was watching. She felt my eyes on her and she looked at me.

“What did you see?” I asked her, with just a little bit of firmness, catching her by surprise.

“No la vi,” she said, and I could see in my periphery another woman’s face turn sharply in the older woman’s direction.

The older woman seemed to catch herself. “No lo vi,” she said. And then, “No vi nada.” “I did not see anything” is where she’d ended up. And just before: “I did not see him.” But the first thing she said, the unedited thing, the true thing, was: “I did not see her.” Her.

“The sniper was a woman?” I asked, looking hard at the older woman.

“No, señor,” she said, lying in every little way a reporter is trained to see, by a blinking of the eyes and a slight fidgeting of the shoulders and a pinching of the voice. “I do not know who shot.”

I looked at the other faces. “Was the sniper a woman?” I asked them all.

They weren’t talking, even if they knew.

I’d done all I could do for the wounded man and this was all I was going to get from the women. I rose and said good night to them and they were polite and a couple of them were nervous, and I moved off.

And moving slowly back north on La Avenida de la Independencia, along the face of the church, I had the obvious crazy thought. She hated the Mexican priests. She had a thing to do before she got out of town. She was a pretty damn good shot, which wouldn’t surprise me. It was Luisa. That was an intriguing little page-four-or-so story I didn’t intend to file.

Overhead the great bronze bells in the campanario struck the half hour — six-thirty — and almost instantly up ahead, from the belfry of the Palacio Municipal, a tenor of bells ecohoed the church’s bass. I could use a drink. I was trying to put Luisa out of my mind once again, but she was resisting. I tried harder: It might not even have been her; it probably wasn’t her. Even if the sniper were a woman, an urban soldadera, Luisa was a washer girl. Where could she have learned to be a crack shot? But there was a simple answer to that: She could have learned the basics from a dad or a brother, and the rest you’ve either got or you don’t. And I walked faster.

By the time I reached the edge of the zócalo, the band had started playing. I hesitated a moment under the coconut palms at the edge of the Plaza. My table in the portales was calling me, but I looked down the path to the band shell. Not only was a German ship sitting in the harbor with sixteen thousand cases of ammunition for Huerta or whoever else, there were upward of fifty thousand Germans in Mexico, many thousands fresh from the Fatherland and carrying the Kaiser’s stamp on their passports and operating the banks that held a big chunk of Mexico’s international debt, all this while Herr Wilhelm was clearly working himself up for some kind of war in Europe. So a German band playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” in a kiosko in Vera Cruz while under American occupation flared my journalist’s nostrils.