Blood Lake (12 page)

“And when I woke up, the man I had given myself to was gone, and I found myself giving birth at home, alone. I had to cut the cord with a rusty bread knife and tie it off myself,” she says. “It was so
tiring
.”

We look out on the gray wetness behind the school, past the chain-link fence, through the trees climbing out of the muck on leglike roots, to the dappled patchwork reflections of sad-eyed shacks on the droplet-rippled water.

“The night my little Lisabeta died was a night like any other,” she goes on. “It wasn't dark or stormy or anything like that. And Father Samuel wouldn't have meant a thing to me, but I was feeling pretty vulnerable, and if I had gotten hold of a sharp enough dagger I would have cut my stomach open with it. We only met for half an hour, but he stopped me from doing it. He made me feel like a person again. Sounds silly, doesn't it? So even though I only knew him for a few minutes, there was always a special place for him in my heart.”

Sister Cecilia and I are standing in her office, looking through the cross-shaped iron bars of the open window. Even in this soupy heat, the yellow floor tiles are cool, and the dampness bleeds through the whitewashed cement walls, saturating the air with a dank odor that makes it feel like some kind of subterranean cavern.

“And when I heard that Father Samuel needed someone to help run the school, I resolved to be the one chosen.”

“Yes,” I say, clutching the cement sill. “He meant something similar to me.”

“How could they do this to him? To that beautiful human being?” she asks, as tears fill our eyes, and without anyone asking why, we both let ourselves cry for him.

Eventually, the sound of sirens in the distance brings me back to the material reality of this place.

“Have the police—” I have to clear my throat and swallow. “Have the police been here yet?”

“Yes, but they said they'd be coming back,” Sister Cecilia says.

“Then I don't have much time. What did they ask you?”

“They asked me when was the last time I saw him alive.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“Last night, at Saturday evening Mass.”

“Do you remember what time it was?”

“We left him a little after nine,” she says.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Maybe nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, I guess.”

I'm not going to get exact minutes out of anyone.

“And when did you hear about what happened?”

“Some of the neighborhood boys starting banging on the gate around half past midnight. I ran all the way there and my habit got filthy, then they wouldn't let me up to see for myself.”

“Who wouldn't let you go up?”

“The men from the neighborhood.”

“Did
anybody
go up to investigate?”

“Somebody said we'd better wait for the police to get there.”

“Now, what adult male from this neighborhood would show that much respect for the police?”

“This was different, Filomena. It was Padre Samuel.”

“All the more reason.”

“All I know is they kept saying that we'd better wait for the police.”

“So who was this somebody who started it all?”

“I—I'm sorry, Fil. I was too upset to notice.”

And none of my interviewees mentioned anything even remotely like this. I'll have to ask around again after the initial shock wears off and see if anyone remembers anything a bit more useful.

“Listen, Sister, I've spent half the afternoon listening to every idiotic theory imaginable about what happened— maybe it was a street gang hungry for retribution, or a city agency hungry for territory, and maybe it was a gay love triangle because that's how ‘those people' are—but I believe it was triggered by the human rights report and that means he was killed on somebody's orders, and I'd like to know what you think about that. Why would anyone want him dead?” I ask her. “After all these years, why now?”

“Like you said, that report's the key.”

“Do you have a copy?”

Sister Cecilia sags a bit. “I should, but they were all in the parish house.”

“Which was conveniently carted off an hour ago. Do you have any of those fake pamphlets supposedly written by Father Samuel calling for the relocation of the squatters?”

Same answer, which leaves me temporarily clueless. Damn. Why did I give Lucho Freire the only copy I had? Because I didn't count on
this
.

I wonder. Between Saturday and Sunday evening Padre Samuel usually celebrated Mass at least three or four times. “What did he say in his sermon?”

“He spoke about the election campaigns,” says Sister Cecilia. “All the false words and promises used to demonize the opposition. He told the people to look deeper, and to choose wisely.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about the threats against his life?”

“No. Well—not really, but—” begins Sister Cecilia.

“Go on.”

“Well, it's just that it's so hard to think about this now.”

“Take your time, Sister.”

We listen to the muffled pattering of rain on tin rooftops.

“It was about three weeks ago. Padre Samuel had just given a homily on the passage in Daniel where they drink wine and praise the gods of gold and silver, of brass and iron, of wood and stone—”

“Yes? And?” I ask.

“And when the sermon was over, I asked him about the challenges God had put before him, and he said to me, ‘After you've walked through the fiery furnace, you are not afraid of kids playing with matches.'”

Kids again. Damn.

“That sounds like him all right,” I say. I try to block everything else out so I can think for a minute here.

If Padre Samuel had his radio playing loud enough for the neighbors to hear it, then some kid could have snuck up those rickety stairs without him noticing it. But to stage a blackout and lunge into the darkness? Too many ways of screwing it up. And after seeing those bulldozers at work there is no doubt in my mind that this was a professional hit. I'm betting he knew the killer well enough to meet him alone in his office until an accomplice cut off the power in the whole neighborhood. It takes planning, but you don't have to be the
Mission: Impossible
team to pull it off. All you have to do is pull a three-way plug.

I've got to go talk to those street kids.

“I'll be back in a little while,” I say, but too late. Sister Josefina comes in, her round
costeña
's face wet from the softly drizzling rain, and tells us that blue-and-gray police cars are pulling down this dead-end street. In a moment, bored uniformed cops flop against the doorway like wet sandbags, occupying the entrance, and a provincial police sergeant strides through the door.

I'm sweeping up, trying to pass as the maid.

He clicks his heels and salutes Sister Cecilia as if she were a superior officer. He refuses her offer of coffee.

“We have some questions about the money,” he announces. “The suspect was caught with two million sucres. We assume this money was stolen from the church.”

“We couldn't have collected more than sixty or seventy thousand sucres last night,” Sister Cecilia explains.

“Do you have any idea where Padre Campos would have gotten so much money?” asks the sergeant.

“No, we don't,” she says.

“Then we must investigate the possibility that the suspect was paid to commit the murder.”

“Are you sure that Ismaél did it?” asks Sister Cecilia.

He smiles. “We don't believe that the perpetrator could have gotten through three locked doors without forcing them and being heard, so it must have been someone the Padre knew well enough to invite in.”

Three locked doors? Where did
that
come from? The nuns look in my direction. I surreptitiously shake my head no.

“The Padre's door was always open to anyone,” says Sister Josefina.

The sergeant glances over at me, then turns back to the sisters. “You were saying?”

“He never locked his door,” she says. “Except at night, of course, like the rest of us. He was a man of faith, but he wasn't crazy.”

“No, but he was a weak old man,” says the sergeant. “And this Ismaél was the last person to see the Padre before he was found with his throat cut from ear to ear like a
carnaval
pig. Oh, I'm sorry, sisters.”

He pretends it's a slip, but it's obvious he's trying to get a reaction out of them, and it's starting to piss me off. Padre Samuel was strong enough to fight off an attacker with a knife, in which case there'd be defensive wounds all over his body. If he was taken completely by surprise, then it's possible there'd just be the one major wound. But the man I knew was flat broke, kept his door wide open, and was probably shot because someone didn't like his politics. The way the cops are telling it, he was stabbed behind three locked doors and the thief got away with a small fortune in unmarked bills. That's a pretty serious discrepancy.

The sergeant is looking at me again. He doesn't look away this time.

I decide to speak. “When will his body be ready for a Christian burial?”

“And who are you?” he asks.

I blurt out: “Sister Mary Martha,” before either of the nuns can say anything.

The sergeant looks me over, taking in my damp shirt and jeans.

“She's a lay sister,” Sister Cecilia explains.

Yeah. And it's casual Sunday at the Vatican.

“And you serve God with a broom?” the sergeant asks.

“They also serve who cook and sweep,” says Sister Cecilia.

The sergeant chuckles. “We'll be needing to talk to you all again soon. And once again, I am sorry for your loss.” And he leaves without answering my question.

When he's gone, Sister Josefina says, “We've just committed a sin.”

I'm thinking, Yeah, I commit a lot of sins, some of them far worse than lying to some asshole police sergeant.

But Sister Cecilia absolves us all, declaring, “‘
Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona
.' Crime is honest for a good cause. Publilius Syrus, circa 42
B.C.
”

Can't beat a classical education.

Street gang. Sounds like the setup for a lame joke, since half the neighborhood doesn't even have streets. There's no time to go downtown, so I head into the parochial kitchen to borrow a knife—a cheap, dull knife with a cracked handle. Great. But it's big enough to impress the boys.

There are plenty of street punks around, but none of them will give me anything more than a twisted snicker. I'm also getting tired of using diplomacy.

Relief comes in the form of a green-eyed adolescent with muddy bare feet who's fighting with a girl and calling her dirty names, pulling her hair until she cries.

I separate them, drag the boy over to a cracked cement wall and lecture him about how girls are the nicest things on God's earth, and that if he can't be nice to them, then he's obviously a worthless punk who deserves to have his ass kicked. And I'm sure he doesn't want his ass kicked.

“Ah, fuck you,
señora
,” he says.

I shove him against the wall hard enough to loosen bits of stucco, and twist his arm way up behind him, hunger-gnawed tendons stretched to bowstring tautness. This is no test of championship skills. It's not hard to out-muscle an emaciated thirteen-year-old, for crap's sake. It's not hard to make him hurt.

“It's
señor
ita,” I say. “And don't talk to me that way.”

“Why? What'd you ever do for me, you fuckin—”

I give him another demonstration of my skills.

“
¡Ayy! ¡Mujer challashca!
”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” That was Quichua, the language of the mountain people. I let him have some of his arm back. Flakes of chipped white plaster cling to his shoulders like cement dandruff. He shakes them out.

“And I could call you
chipa huahua
, too,” I say, also in Quichua, “but I'd rather use your name. What is it?”

He's about to give his usual answer, so I tighten my grip, and he reconsiders.

“Mishojos,” he says.

“Mishojos?” Cat's eyes. “That's a
serrano
name.”

“Yeah. My family came to the city to find work. But there's no work, no land, no food. So we ended up here, majorly fucked.”

A common story.

“So no
huasipichana
, eh?”

He looks at me. “
¿Eres de mi tierra?
”

“
Claro que sí
.”

“
¿Y qué quieres de mí?
”

Well, we're getting somewhere. I ask him.

“I don't know any kids in gangs,” he says.

“Oh, come on. You live around here, right? You've got to know who's in the gangs. That's the reason gangs exist, for God's sake, for everyone to know who you are. Now tell me.”