The Right Eye of God Read online

  “I’ve heard about a few of the grim killings, but never so many, and I never connected any of them to Raldon,” Hebrano said.

  “Well, it’s all happened so fast! Just in the last year the five major gangs have begun flaunting the power of forty billion dollars of drug money—control of that much cash is a powerful incentive for them to start a war against the feds, and if what Maria told Raldon about the timing of the assassination is true, it could happen in a few days, on Día de los Muertos. Those were her words.”

  “The Day of the Dead! How appropriate for a killing! It’s a national celebration,” Hebrano said. Then he shook his head. “With all the signs of suffering we saw on Raldon’s face, it’s obvious his killers were desperate to learn what Maria told him.”

  “What makes matters worse is the failure of our DEA people who interviewed Maria here in Mexico to take her seriously. They decided she wasn’t reliable. They patted her on the head and politely told her they weren’t interested in her little story. Such unbelievable arrogance! Their dismissal scared the wits out of her. She asked for protection, and they turned her out into the cold. She appealed to Raldon, and he got her into the States. He contacted me to write her story when she was safe.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear about Raldon,” Hebrano said, “but why did he need you? He could have reported Maria’s story to the right people here.”

  “That’s just it. He couldn’t. He knew his own life was in danger for hiding Maria. And he didn’t know who to trust in his own government. Lazlo Peñas, who is the new director of the Federal Judicial Police, may be as honest as they come in Mexico, but Raldon had reason to suspect some of his underlings. It takes time to root out corruption. You can’t do it overnight, and Peñas is still new in his job. A retaliation plot to kill Calderón, who is a prime target because of his war on drugs, is not a stretch, not at all.

  “I convinced my former boss, the head of Alliance News Syndicate, to talk to the right people in our Justice Department. He urged them to send somebody to Mexico, somebody who has the background to evaluate the information Raldon collected and make an appraisal of how serious the situation really is. Raldon insisted it should be me.”

  Navarre hesitated, and then said, “Maria also mentioned Duelos and dogs. I don’t know why. Her words were out of context, and Raldon couldn’t give them any meaning. But here is where he died.”

  “The Day of the Dead. I wonder what significance it has to murder?” Hebrano said.

  He fell silent for a moment as if trying to retrieve an unimportant memory. Then, with his face as grave as varnished stone, he said, “There is a veterinarian, Rodriguez, I think his name is, who bought an isolated farm twenty miles or so from here several years ago. Nobody knows much about him, except that he is strange. For a while, until about a year ago—I can’t be exact—he treated farm animals as well as the locals from other villages like this one. I think he raised and sold guard dogs for a while, but I’m not sure, and he treated family pets, dogs, goats, and farm wounds. A broken hand, a knife cut, small things. Then he stopped. Turned people and their animals away for no reason. Nobody has seen him for a long time.”

  Hebrano drank from his cup, holding the wine in his mouth as if it were a thought worth savoring before swallowing.

  “He’s isolated enough for secret doings,” Hebrano added meditatively. “It’s thirty-five miles to Chihuahua, fifteen of them by that country road you came in on. That’s the nearest town of any size at all. Nothing much in between unless you count the coyotes, the few wolves, and lizards and rattlesnakes. It’s a perfect place for murder. And Raldon’s body was found only a few miles from the vet’s farm. If the wind hadn’t uncovered him, nobody would ever have known.”

  “Yes, and if I know anything about Mexico, by sundown your vet will know there is an American in Duelos with Texas plates on his car who visited the dead man in the company of a priest.”

  “Yes, you can count on that,” Hebrano agreed, staring up at the dim aisle of the church, where the yellow rays of late October sunlight stealing under the front doors played on the cracked stone floor. “I was in the army for ten years. I’ve known the kind of men who could turn stoics into compulsive talkers with much less damage than Raldon suffered before he was killed.”

  He shook his head as if trying to dislodge unpleasant memories.

  Navarre did not miss the shadow of regret that passed over Hebrano’s face. He hesitated, glanced at the heavy black Colt that lay on the table, and said, “You still haven’t explained about the pistol. Why does a priest carry a gun? Why does a man I met on the road tell me this is a bad place? Why is the village holding its breath?”

  Hebrano sighed. “I wondered if you sensed the strangeness. I have been holding back. I . . .” He frowned deeply, creases corrugating his forehead, crow’s-feet choking his eyes. “I made this special trip because I heard some strange things were going on. I got here before supper last night. And of course, the people came, straggling in shyly, contrite, as they always are for blessings, to arrange for confessions, for baptisms, for penances, and to talk. I was tired and too dull to be concerned about how few of them there were. Hell, there couldn’t have been more than a dozen or so who showed up. And they were reticent, afraid. They paid their respects, they were courteous but wary, and they slipped away as quickly as they could.”

  Hebrano’s eyes had hardened. He looked fiercely at Navarre. “These people are being scared into leaving Duelos. A campaign of terror has them jumping out of their skins. In a few weeks this place will be a ghost town.”

  “Why? Who’s behind it?” Navarre asked.

  Hebrano shook his head and said with suppressed anger, “There’s an old man, God knows how old, a filthy, degenerate old man I’ve driven out of a dozen villages on my circuit. He wanders the desert and the mountains selling cures and curses. I’ve heard he comes from one of the isolated tribes high in the Sierras. There are many such places where pureblooded indígenas still survive. Little pockets of history. They still speak the ancient tribal language. Their customs and beliefs are the same as their ancestors’, and they worship the same old Indian deities, evil spirits, and powers of sorcery. I don’t know his name. He’s called the sin eater by the ignorant.”

  “The sin eater?”

  “Yes,” Hebrano replied impatiently. “I call him Zopo. I’d never met anyone in my life whom I consider thoroughly evil. But I believe he is. He has a caul in his left eye, which is supposed to be a sign of power. The evil eye. He stinks like a buzzard and looks like one, like a zopilote, with the layers of rags he wears like molting feathers.”

  “So, he is here, here in the village?”

  “Yes. But the people hide him. They’re terrified of crossing him.”

  “You’re actually suggesting someone hired a brujo, this Zopilote of yours, to drive these people out? Why? It just doesn’t make any kind of sense. What would be gained by chasing harmless people away?”

  “If I knew the answer to that,” Hebrano said with irritation, “maybe we’d know why Raldon was killed, and we probably could make a good guess about what part the farm plays in the assassination, if it does at all. Raldon wouldn’t have balked at the idea of hiring a brujo to play dirty tricks on these people.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Navarre agreed solemnly. The priest’s observation was accurate. He’d been gone from Mexico only two years and had forgotten that when he drove south he had entered a country poised between the primitive and the modern. Duelos lived in the past, in the shadow of blood and bone and monsters and magical chicken feathers. Finally, he said softly, “Of course, you’re right. But you hit a nerve. You forget we Anglos are untouchable pragmatists. To believe in anything more spiritual than an enema is a kind of heresy in the United States.”

  Hebrano chuckled at himself. “You are right to make fun of me. I get too serious. But your mock cynicism won’t change what’s happening.”

  “No, it won’t.” Navarre said. “I do
recognize the harm witches can do. Terrorism by brujería is old hat in Mexico. But the sorcery you’re talking about is not of the routine quackery variety, is it? The bag of tricks, the graveyard dust, blood stones and dried lizard’s tongues, and that mumbo jumbo.”

  “No, it’s far more serious than that. It’s contrived maliciousness, with horror stories, apparitions, and murder.”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes. Murder. Which I verified early this morning, before Raldon’s body was discovered.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s step outside and get some air in our lungs. Then I’ll show you. We’ve been cooped up here for an hour. Then, we’ll have supper.”

  “Are you going to take the Colt with you?”

  “You bet your ass I am.”

  -

  Chapter III

  -

  Navarre strolled beside Hebrano, inhaling the sharp tang of the yellow-gray creosote bushes released by the cool of the encroaching shadows. Clumps of chino grama grass and scraggly mesquite trees grew near the trail that meandered out of the village. A gray lizard basking in the late afternoon sun tested the air for moisture with his flicking tongue.

  When they had put the church a few hundred feet behind them, Hebrano stopped and turned toward the village, urging Navarre with a light pressure on his elbow to face in the same direction.

  “What should you be hearing, and seeing, in a Mexican village at this time of day? What is missing?”

  Navarre stared at Hebrano, curiously unsettled. He studied the somnolent village. There was something missing. Some object . . . some activity. But he couldn’t put a name to it.

  “All right,” he said, honestly puzzled, “what is it? What’s missing?”

  “Have you seen a single dog since you drove into the village? Do you hear one barking now?”

  “No, by God, I don’t.”

  “Don’t you think it’s peculiar?”

  “I think it’s damned peculiar.”

  “As far as I can learn, every dog has died. Alive and hungry one day, existing on scraps, dead the next. No explanation. Poisoned or some strange sickness is the common belief.”

  “But why? Who? It doesn’t make sense. Is the sudden absence of dogs the mystery Maria Montrero was referring to?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t know why they’ve been killed. The who is a different story,” Hebrano said grimly. “I told you I verified one murder this morning. The body is buried over there in the graveyard.”

  The priest pointed to a dusty knoll in the distance. Navarre could see that it was a resting place for the rusted carcasses of old automobiles and the warped and desiccated boards and wheels of a worn-out old wagon. A dead tire buried in the sand sprouted scraggly weeds in its middle. A sagging windlass, deep in shadow, stood solitary guard over a cracked, wind-blown cistern, and poking out of the dry, barren earth, crumbling and weathering away, were perhaps three dozen or so rudely made wooden crosses, all of the cross arms of which, save seven or eight, were missing.

  “The most recent grave out here,” Hebrano said, “belongs to a curandera. Not a bruja—a curandera. You know the difference?”

  “A good witch, supposedly.”

  “At least not a malicious one. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  The priest led Navarre a few steps, then dropped to one knee beside a new grave. The soil was not compacted, and looked fresh compared to the others. Hebrano motioned Navarre to look closely at the grave. “What do you see that’s different from the others?”

  Puzzled, kneeling beside Hebrano, Navarre studied the dry, brown earth. “I see a faint line of white sand that circles the grave.”

  “Wet your fingertip and taste it.”

  The strange request surprised Navarre, but he complied.

  “Salt!” he said. “It’s salt. Why?”

  “When I looked at this grave this morning, I found the salt sprinkled around the stones on top of her grave, just like it is now. I knew what it was, but I tasted it to be sure.”

  “But why?”

  “Salt, the bad-luck sign, is sprinkled in a circle around a grave to keep the spirit of the murdered person from escaping to do vengeance on the killer. Tepe Remolino, who’s buried here, sold some harmless remedies for diarrhea, colic, backache, pimples, things like that, and religious medals to ward off the bad spells of brujos. She was knifed in the back about two weeks ago, and then her grave was salted. Only a brujo would do that.”

  A strange prickle of fear made Navarre sound defensive: “Your Zopo man, right? Knifes Tepe Remolino because she’s on to him, scares the villagers into silence, maybe kills off the dogs for some obscure reason, and commits God knows what other acts of terror? One dirty old man could do all that without anyone trying to stop him? Nobody lifts a hand? That seems far fetched to me.”

  “I’m not asking you to believe anything,” Hebrano replied stolidly. “Just accept what you can’t understand and don’t try to translate the fears of the people in the village to your own modern standard of reality. It won’t work. It never has; it never will. Just remember, man, out here magic works. It works.”

  “Yes, I guess it does. I . . . I . . . What next?”

  “Supper,” Hebrano answered, rising to his feet, “and afterwards hot, black coffee laced with some brandy I’ve got. Come on, I’m hungry.”

  Supper, a simple meal of frying-pan stew, tortillas, and black coffee laced with brandy, was a welcome respite from the mutual tensions the men shared and the private ones each kept to himself. They exchanged a few cautious personal insights, and they discovered joint admiration for the haunting, mystical works of Gabriel Márquez. “. . . Genius,” Hebrano shouted enthusiastically, “who writes God on the tip of his pencil. If you understand the sadness and magic and grand distortions of Márquez, there’s hope for you, Thomas. Hey, I’ll finish the dishes. There’s about a half hour of light left. Go! Stretch your legs. I’ll catch up with you.”

  Navarre was grateful for release. He dried his hands and walked up the shadow-strewn aisle of the church and stepped outside. In the gathering late-afternoon dusk, the sun an orange sliver above the rim of the mountains, the bleak village of Duelos had become saffron hued, the blending of fading turquoise sky and drowning sunlight making a softness and clarity that painted the clutter of adobe buildings with charitable strokes of color, muted ochre and purple, achieving that rare southwestern ambiance which tourists to Mexico describe as quaint and somnolent.

  Navarre paused a few steps beyond the threshold of the church to inhale the sweet dustiness of the yellow-gray creosote bushes and the peppery smell of the ground-hugging, scraggly dwarf mesquite trees. Upon the air also was the diffused, lingering odor of the cooking fires of the villagers mingled with the acrid smell of the dry earth.

  When he saw him in the long shadow of Hebrano’s jeep, squatting on his haunches in his drooping drawers of coarse cotton manta in an odd circle of clay dishes and cups, Navarre stepped back with a start and stared, not quite believing his eyes. An old man, sandal footed, a ragged petate hat on the ground at his feet, his round, wrinkled head perching like a dried raisin on his body. His bony shoulders were hunched, scrawny neck drawn in turtlelike so that his head seemed perched without connection to his body. He was gobbling pieces of food, licking his fingers as he chewed, smacking his lips, snatching morsels from several clay bowls resting on the ground at his feet. His filthy torso was covered with layers of shredded cloth, one shirt remnant adhering to the rotting fabric of the one beneath, a dozen moldering layers. He looked top heavy, like a scruffy pouter pigeon, chest expanded, adorned with wilted flakes of gray ashes. The fading sunlight put a shine on his bare black arms and stringy muscles. He could not have been unaware of Navarre’s presence, but it did not perturb him. One black, beady eye was without expression, a red-circled, sunken hole in the blackness of his face. The left eye was opaque, milky. It flashed sunlight like a blank mirror as he twisted his head to examine a dirt
-encrusted piece of chicken, then poked it into his rubbery mouth and crunched and chomped. Navarre felt a faint nausea. He could hear the sand grinding under the man’s molars.

  He heard a step behind him. “Fabian?” he said. His voice was a whisper.

  “I see him.”

  Hebrano walked a few paces to the right of Navarre and stopped. He wedged his fists on his hips. The heavy black Colt was tucked prominently in the front of his waistband. There was disgust and contempt in his voice when he said, “Ah, the Zopilote. What’s got your courage up, old bastard, coming here and making magic in front of my church? I told you what I would do the next time I saw you.”

  The old man wiped his greasy lips with the back of his hand and stared without expression at Hebrano. He rested his naked arms on his knees with his sharp elbows sticking out at right angles to his body. Navarre thought of an insolent black crow squatting defiantly in the road with his wings armed for attack.

  Suddenly, the old man cackled. A heh, heh, heh screeching sound, his beady black eye and the milky one fixed brightly on Hebrano.

  “Hey, priest,” he cawed in a cracked voice, in a dialect Navarre found hard to follow, “I greet you. Here is my greeting.” He grunted, shifting his weight, his buttocks spreading in his balloon britches, and he broke wind, a rippling, noisy flatulence of bursting bubbles of gas. On the faint breeze, the odor staled the air and Navarre stepped back holding his breath. An unbelievable stink. He must be corrupted inside.

  “Goddamn,” Hebrano swore. He yanked the Colt from his waistband and handed it to Navarre. He said in English, “If he moves, shoot the son of a bitch. Don’t kill him. Shoot off a toe or aim between his legs. I’m going . . .”