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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.
    â€œYes. Yes, señor,” a couple of them said.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œDid 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