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away. She was the one who knew something.
    I needed to make another gesture. I looked at the priest, whose head had lolled to the side on the pavement. “We should make him comfortable,” I said. “May I have something for his head?”
    One of the women crossed herself and unwrapped her rebozo and rolled it and kneeled next to me. She lifted the priest’s head very gently and slid the cloth beneath it. Though I was interested in the tenderness of her gesture and how she might have always longed to touch him like this, I put that aside, and instead, I looked up at the silent woman, who was watching. She felt my eyes on her and she looked at me.
    â€œWhat did you see?” I asked her, with just a little bit of firmness, catching her by surprise.
    â€œ No la vi, ” she said, and I could see in my periphery another woman’s face turn sharply in the older woman’s direction.
    The older woman seemed to catch herself. “ No lo vi, ” she said. And then, “ No vi nada .” “I did not see anything” is where she’d ended up. And just before: “I did not see him.” But the first thing she said, the unedited thing, the true thing, was: “I did not see her.” Her.
    â€œThe sniper was a woman?” I asked, looking hard at the older woman.
    â€œNo, señor,” she said, lying in every little way a reporter is trained to see, by a blinking of the eyes and a slight fidgeting of the shoulders and a pinching of the voice. “I do not know who shot.”
    I looked at the other faces. “Was the sniper a woman?” I asked them all.
    They weren’t talking, even if they knew.
    I’d done all I could do for the wounded man and this was all I was going to get from the women. I rose and said good night to them and they were polite and a couple of them were nervous, and I moved off.
    And moving slowly back north on La Avenida de la Independencia, along the face of the church, I had the obvious crazy thought. She hated the Mexican priests. She had a thing to do before she got out of town. She was a pretty damn good shot, which wouldn’t surprise me. It was Luisa. That was an intriguing little page-four-or-so story I didn’t intend to file.
    Overhead the great bronze bells in the campanario struck the half hour—six-thirty—and almost instantly up ahead, from the belfry of the Palacio Municipal, a tenor of bells ecohoed the church’s bass. I could use a drink. I was trying to put Luisa out of my mind once again, but she was resisting. I tried harder: It might not even have been her; it probably wasn’t her. Even if the sniper were a woman, an urban soldadera, Luisa was a washer girl. Where could she have learned to be a crack shot? But there was a simple answer to that: She could have learned the basics from a dad or a brother, and the rest you’ve either got or you don’t. And I walked faster.
    By the time I reached the edge of the zócalo, the band had started playing. I hesitated a moment under the coconut palms at the edge of the Plaza. My table in the portales was calling me, but I looked down the path to the band shell. Not only was a German ship sitting in the harbor with sixteen thousand cases of ammunition for Huerta or whoever else, there were upward of fifty thousand Germans in Mexico, many thousands fresh from the Fatherland and carrying the Kaiser’s stamp on their passports and operating the banks that held a big chunk of Mexico’s international debt, all this while Herr Wilhelm was clearly working himself up for some kind of war in Europe. So a German band playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” in a kiosko in Vera Cruz while under American occupation flared my journalist’s nostrils.

8
    The benches along the path were full of older locals, segregated by sex, some full of men with their sombreros in their laps, others full of women with their rebozos gathered no farther than