Relic of Time (31 page)

It is I who have sinned.

It is I who became too familiar with the presence of your holy image, as if it were owed to us.

This terrible thing had been sent upon them as a sign and a warning. The absence of the Virgin's image called attention to her absence from their hearts.

This sermon, more than anything else, calmed passions in the city and in the country and beyond. It appealed to the penitential spirit latent in every heart pumping with some Indian blood.

Great acts of asceticism were performed. Many fasted. Some moved bare-kneed across the plaza to the basilica. Two men dragged a huge cross for two hundred miles. Sharing the burden, they then had drawn lots to see which of them would be crucified at the shrine. Only quick action on the part of the now extremely alert security forces prevented the execution of this pact.

But it captured the minds and imaginations of millions. The bishop visited the one man in jail and the other in the hospital, where he was recovering from the loss of blood. The one nail that had entered him had found an artery. When the bishop blessed him, he blessed him back. With his unbandaged hand. He was written of as the Good Thief.

And now, when the prayers and acts of penance seemed finally to have been answered, when the procession in which the holy image, still wrapped in its foam case, moved ever more slowly to the basilica, collecting people as it went, it was as if a great collective hallelujah had gone up.

She is back! She has returned!

The beads of rosaries moved rapidly over crooked index fingers, counted off by the thumb.
Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosostros pecadores.

The expectation, the pent-up joy that everyone seemed to have stored up as a final and complete expression of gratitude for the great event, was about to burst—and then, pfffft. The first reaction was deflation. The great crowd in the plaza seemed to collapse as, inside the basilica, the bishop had collapsed on the floor overcome by grief.

And then came anger.

Rage.

Soon, there was a great armed surge northward, through Sonora, across the border, with Phoenix the objective. Within the week, the streets of Phoenix would teem with people indistinguishable from the crowds in the streets of South and Central America. A ragtag band would now claim to be in control of one of the great cities of the American Southwest, control meaning the occupation of several buildings and of a television station.

But that was yet to come.

The following day, in Washington, an explosive device did some damage to what is called the National Cathedral. Only a senator or two expressed dismay. Whoever had thought that bulky imitation of an English cathedral symbolized the religious commitments of the American people was risibly mistaken. Not even the ACLU took seriously the suggestion that the cathedral was analogous to, say, Notre Dame in Paris, where even the most profligate of presidents prayed on state occasions, kneeling on a prie-dieu for all his mistresses to see.

When the Lincoln Memorial was defaced, there was a stronger reaction.

Homeland Security raised the level of danger to the maximum.

In Mexico City the demand that the gringo who had attempted this hoax be brought immediately to justice became a mantra.

Death to the gringo!

String him up!

And, an indication of time spent up north: Get whitey!

The gringo was on the run.

After the bishop cried out in anguished disappointment when the foam case was opened, Traeger was elbowed aside as the crowd surged forward. This had the effect of moving him backward, stumbling, nearly falling. Another man would have begun rehearsing what he might say to the bishop when he recovered. Traeger was not that man. He knew a blown operation when he saw one.

In a minute he was outside, cursing the ruse of sending Smiley winging toward Miami, presumably leaving Traeger to savor the triumph of the restoration of the image. Traeger himself was heading north. His mind was full of the scene at Don Ibanez's little basilica. How had the shift of foam cases been made?

But that could wait. First he had to get the hell out of this country. He had been made a fool of, but he had felt foolish before, not quite like this, but close enough. He shed his suit jacket as he went, handing it to a beggar. He opened his shirt. He grabbed a floppy hat from a stand as he went by it. From another vendor's stand he snatched a serape and a pair of sandals. In a side street, he took off his street shoes and got into the sandals, a change he would regret in the hours ahead. The woman to whom he handed his shoes was surprised, but she quickly covered them with her shawl and clutched them to her bosom. Aswim in the sea of the people, Traeger pressed on.

A mile from the basilica, he saw armed men clambering into a truck. He hopped aboard, sat, pulling his knees to his chest, covering his face with the brim of his hat. He left the truck when it had cleared the city, heading north still, taking a rifle with him, along with a bandolier an eager warrior had removed in order to get more comfortable in the lurching truck.

The distance from Mexico City to Sonora just below the Arizona border seemed to melt away as the determined, now silent, bands moved to the north. Clad as he was, and armed, Traeger was anonymous among so many. When addressed, he grunted or spat, sometimes both. He did not dare attempt to speak. His Spanish was rusty and in any case was a different language than that being spoken around him.

Several times, he clung to trucks filled with grim-faced men. Once he rode a burro so small he helped it along with his dangling feet. He decided the luxury was too costly. He could stroll and make better time.

It was deep night when the mass of which he had become a part eventually reached the border, a flood of thousands, many of whom broke through the hurriedly called-up units of the National Guard. Some would go on and claim to have occupied Phoenix.

In a Red Roof Inn, Traeger managed to commandeer a room and lock himself in. The one thing he had been determined to keep was his cell phone. He turned it on, scrolled through the address book, punched a button, and listened to the phone ring far off in New Hampshire.

He cut off the call before it was answered. Reporting to his employer? Traeger no longer considered himself the agent of Ignatius Hannan. From now on, he would be acting for himself. It was he who had been made an ass of, not Hannan. The thought of calling Dortmund came and went. First he had to think, to reconstruct how he had been duped.

He reviewed every stage in the execution of what had seemed a good plan. It was a good plan. Only a good plan could have gone so wrong. The face that kept looming before him was that of Miguel Arroyo. When he had come upon Miguel standing beside Jason Phelps in the shadow of the covered patio behind the retired professor's house, he should have aborted the plan. His earlier guess as to how Arroyo had learned of the planned transfer was only that, a guess. Worth told Lowry and Lowry told Arroyo. If the first part of that seemed remotely plausible, the second made no sense. Why would Lowry, if he had been informed by Worth, pass it on to Arroyo?

How then?

Arroyo had been the means of getting the original of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from Mexico City to the basilica on Don Ibanez's estate. Was it possible that the old man, in a magnanimous gesture, out of a sense of noblesse oblige, had decided to let Arroyo in on the plan? But why not inform Traeger if he had?

All that could wait. Traeger lay back on the bed, reviewing step by step what had happened. The rental of the U-Haul might have caused speculation. And ordering the foam case. Of course he had imagined that those who had been in the Chinook that came banging down at Theophilus Grady's hideaway would still be at work. It was they, or their fellows, who had assassinated Morgan, only to find that what he had attempted to sell was not the original image. Had they tried to take Hannan's million as well, ending up with a suitcase of Ray Whipple's clothes? The descent on Grady would have been a second frustration to them. Eventually, they had to believe the Rough Rider. He had never had the missing portrait. So their search would have gone on.

Most sobering of all, everything that Traeger had done up there in Napa Valley had doubtless been under surveillance.

And then he remembered his surprise when Don Ibanez told him that the copy of the image that had hung in his little basilica had been given shelter by Jason Phelps. Was it with that he had driven to the airport and Smiley had flown to Mexico City?

Where was the original now?

Was it hanging again behind the altar in Don Ibanez's basilica? Surely the old man would know the original as easily as the bishop had recognized a mere copy. Traeger remembered the calm with which the old man had reacted after the theft of the image from its shrine. Of course. He had known what was going on. So, too, in the long-term parking lot at the San Francisco airport, Don Ibanez had taken part in what he would have known was a game. Buy back a copy of the image that was hanging in his little basilica? Whoever else had bamboozled Traeger, Don Ibanez certainly had. But always it was of Miguel Arroyo that he thought.

If Traeger had ever doubted, he knew now where he was going.

Reality is what appears on the television screen, and from the beginning events in the Southwest had been reduced to the dimensions of that screen, scenes of undeniable battling soothingly reduced to isolated incidents. But surely now the nature of the problem would be recognized, patriots would arise in the House and Senate and demand action rather than more words. This did not happen, save for Gunther and a few other marginalized lawmakers. This became understandable when a thoughtful essay written for
Foreign Affairs
by the presumptive secretary of state in the presumptive new administration was released to the blogosphere, the glacial wait for print publication unacceptable in present circumstances.

What was happening, the author explained, was more or less what both parties had envisaged when NAFTA was passed, creating the hope of a single great free trade zone reaching from Alaska and the arctic regions of Canada down through the States and on into Mexico to the canal. A single economic unit, but the demands of free enterprise would lead on to political union as well. This had not been clear perhaps in the original Republican proposal, heatedly opposed at the time by Democrats, but it had been a Democratic administration that had gotten the bill through and a subsequent Republican administration that had enlarged it, mapping out the highway that would enable goods to pass freely north and south, and proposing an immigration bill that would have been a giant step toward political consolidation. Unfortunately, that immigration plan had to be put on a back burner when the radio demagogues went after it. But that had been a delay, not a defeat. Whatever the differences between the parties, and the author acknowledged that they were many and deep, as deep as the chasm between the rich and the poor, on the matter in question the parties stood united. The so-called invasion of Arizona and the encirclement of San Diego were nothing less than the preordained results of a sound free trade policy.

His counterpart, the presumptive secretary of state in the unlikely event that the other party should win the election, signed on to the piece as to something self-evident.

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico, who had flown to Washington—some said fled to Washington—expressed their dismay and disapproval. Of course the invaders had declared that the two governors had been replaced. More than half of the Arizona state patrol, with all their cars and equipment, had defected to the invaders. “Republic of Arizona” had replaced “State of Arizona” on their vehicles. Their representative was currently looking for someone with whom to discuss their jeopardized pensions and medical plans.

Whatever truce had been struck on the matter between the two major political parties, talk radio insured that what its ir-repressibly loquacious star called the majority voice was heard. Impeachment proceedings had been launched in hundreds of constituencies. Third parties appeared like mushrooms, plus a toadstool or two. Independent militias were forming from the Dakotas to the Carolinas.

The White House announced that the surge had been a success. Iraq at last was a free and democratic country.

As for the homeland of the patron of this pleasant state of affairs, the picture grew increasingly gloomy. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops was discussing amalgamating with its brother bishops across what had once been the southern border of the United States. When they went into session, the matter was unctuously committed to the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Many diocesan papers, a majority in the Southwest, now used Spanish as their principal language, devoting a few columns to English readers as they once had to Latinos.