Father Joe put a hand on his companion’s shoulder. “What do you say we quit this job and take up golf?”
Paco nodded at the priest, as if he was accustomed to the old man saying things in a language as unfamiliar to him as the dark side of a distant planet.
The priest started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a wheeze. He grabbed a medication inhaler from his pocket and took three quick puffs. When his breathing settled, he turned to Megan and answered the question she hadn’t yet asked. “A touch of emphysema.”
The priest’s smile was framed by creases that looked like etched granite. His blue eyes had a piercing quality, as though they’d easily penetrate another’s thoughts.
A growing sense of guilt was nibbling at Megan, the feeling that she had abandoned Joe Whalen and Steve Dalton. It felt as if she had knocked over a hornet’s nest and left the aftermath for her colleagues, and the people of Ticar Norte.
That thought was still with her when they arrived at the first village two hours later. Xical — one of almost sixty aldeas that Father Joe traveled among with Paco. The priest visited each village no more than three or four times a year, and that fact probably explained the festive greeting that accompanied their arrival at the village.
An hour later Megan was sitting on a bench at the back of a makeshift church, watching Father Joe say Mass while a small rabble of dogs lay at her feet, licking themselves. Every time she moved, pieces of silty muck fell from her clothing as if she were a molting insect. Her wallet and passport made a soggy outline on her jeans.
She felt like a toad next to the women of Xical, who were dressed in brightly colored blouses with immaculate white trim and wraparound skirts that reached to their bare ankles. They appeared to move within some invisible pocket of air that was impenetrable to dust and grime. Only their bare feet, which looked like rusted iron, showed the wear and tear of their lives.
It seemed as if the entire village was crammed into the large wooden structure: about eighty men, women, and children; half as many dogs; a dozen free-range chickens and two roosters; and, in front of the altar, two mice sitting in a makeshift cage made of twigs and twine.
A man standing next to the altar poured incense into a hollowed-out rock filled with hot coals. Mushroom-shaped plumes of smoke rose and wrapped Father Joe in a thick white cloud. He choked out a prayer, then exploded in a fit of coughing and waved his hands in search of air. The incense handler seemed not to notice or concern himself with the priest’s violent reaction, and Father Joe did nothing to stop the smoky ritual.
Over the past half hour, the same scene had played out every five minutes or so. Every time the cloud of incense ebbed, another scoop of incense landed in the bowl and the priest broke into a paroxysm of coughing.
Megan didn’t understand a single word of the Mass. Father Joe was performing the entire service in a Mayan dialect.
The churchgoers suddenly broke out in song, accompanied by an enormous marimba that was manned by five young boys with rounded mallets. They stood along its length, reaching across one another and tapping parallel rows of wooden bars with the speed and precision of knife jugglers.
Father Joe came around to the front of the altar and lifted the captive mice above his head. He appeared to talk to the rodents as the room chanted verses in a singsong tempo. Next, he carried the cage down the center aisle of the church. As he passed the rows of wooden benches, men standing along the aisle spoke to the mice. Megan had stopped attending Mass after her mother died, but she was raised Catholic and knew its liturgy. It seemed that Father Joe was bending the Church’s rituals into the shape of a liturgical pretzel.
When the priest reached the back of the church, he started around the back wall. As he passed Megan, he said, “The field mice are ruining their crops. We’re asking the mice to move someplace else.” He lifted the cage an inch. “After Mass, the elders will take the mice out to the fields and let ’em go so they can tell the other mice about the deal we struck here.” He looked at her and shrugged.
Despite the sweltering midday heat, the Mass continued for another hour. She couldn’t think of anything but food as she followed Father Joe and a throng of villagers out the back of the church.
Just as she lifted her face to the sunlight, the ground shook violently. On the horizon, a huge flock of yellow birds lifted skyward with a loud clatter.
A low-pitched rumble followed seconds later.
The shaking lasted almost a minute, during which the residents of Xical wore expressions of terror.
Then it was gone.
For the next several seconds the only sound came from chickens pecking at the ground.
Megan moved next to Father Joe. “Was that an earthquake?”
The priest was looking into the distance, slowly shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”
Moments later she heard the rushing water. At first it sounded like a river carrying runoff from a storm, but the flow quickly took on an unnatural quality, surging into a wet pulsating din.
A loud crack reverberated in the jungle.
“Father?” she asked.
“I hear it. It sounds like a tree just snapped in half.”
A small group of Indians collected on the far side of the village and pointed east toward a deep gorge that was covered with tropical growth. Trees were going down like bowling pins.
Megan, Father Joe, and Paco gathered their things and followed a dozen men along a twisting mile-long trail toward the ravine.
They wended their way through the jungle, eventually coming to a precipice overlooking a furious torrent of water. The raging river — it was over thirty yards wide — engulfed the slopes of the deep canyon as it raced by them. Loud popping sounds ricocheted off the canyon walls as brushwood broke free at the water’s edge. The hulking carcass of a tree, roots and all, hurtled past them. Eddies of red turbid water swirled like demon whorls rising from the underworld.
Megan watched Father Joe make the sign of the cross. His lips moved, as if in prayer, but his voice was lost in the fury of the watery rampage.
For the next several minutes she stood there dumbfounded, watching the deluge gallop past her. A hypnotic state took hold of her.
Then, just as quickly as it rose, the floodwaters receded. In the span of just five minutes, the river shriveled to a languid stream.
She turned to the priest. His skin was pallid, and his eyes were in another realm.
“Father Joe?”
When he didn’t respond, Megan followed his line of sight.
There, on the shoreline, half submerged in a knotted mess of vines and branches, was the glistening flesh of a naked corpse.
32
Luke clung to the outside edge of a concrete wall and peered at the manicured lawns in front of Griffith Park Observatory. Jets of water angled back and forth over the section of turf closest to him, sending ghost-like swirls of mist skyward.
The Observatory sat on a flat three-acre oval of ground created seventy years ago by shaving off the top of one of the park’s taller peaks. The bank of phones he needed stood on the other side of the grassy expanse, on the western side of the property.
Skirting a maze of crisscrossing hiking trails, it took almost ten minutes to work his way around the steep slope out of which the concrete art-deco structure rose. The Observatory was not yet open, and he expected foot traffic to be nil, but a small army of municipal groundskeepers were milling around the property. They moved at a lethargic pace, appearing to have no more interest in their work than the city had in their lives. They would be easily distracted, drawn to anything that might break up the monotony of their usual routine.