Relic of Time by Ralph McInerny

learned that she was the daughter of Don Ibanez his smile froze. Clare’s father was the spokesmen for those Latinos with generations of prosperity behind them. They disdained such agitators as Miguel.
    â€œA great man,” he said.
    â€œThank you.” But he went on in rapid Spanish. Clare pretended that she did not understand. “ No habla?”
    Clare’s only answer was a smile.
    â€œWhy didn’t you speak to him?” George asked her later.
    â€œHe talks like a commercial on a Spanish radio station.”
    Immediately, she was sorry for what she had said, a snobbish condescension doubtless learned from her father.

VII
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
    Traeger rented a car in Chicago. Flying was too quick and he wanted the thought-inducing monotony of a long drive. Besides, he had to figure out where he was headed. In St. Louis, he phoned Dortmund and learned that Ignatius Hannan had hired Crosby.
    â€œWhat for? He’s offering a reward.”
    â€œCovering his bets?”
    â€œDoes Crosby know I’m on this?”
    â€œWho would tell him?”
    Well, who would tell Dortmund that Crosby had been hired by Hannan? That fragile old man, sunning himself on his retirement patio, oxygen feeding into his nostrils through plastic tubing, seemed to be as much in touch as director emeritus as he had been during his active years. Traeger reminded himself that it was Dortmund who had recommended him to his current successor. How many directors had there been since Dortmund? A series of pygmies.
    He felt at once annoyed and reassured at the thought of Crosby on the same mission as he was. Cooperation of the public and private sectors? But he remembered, too, Dortmund’s parting admonition. Watch your back. How many were after the same objective? He also remembered that the Company claimed to have a mole in the Rough Riders. The more he thought of it, the more he wished he were on his own.
    Obviously, Theo Grady had not returned to Rough Rider headquarters in Santa Barbara. If he had, his arrest would have become public by the time Traeger arrived in Chicago. Hence the rental car and his south-southwest itinerary. The Rough Rider camps along the border had been struck, leaving the mess to the Minutemen, who were apparently defending the border effectively. It was what they had wanted to do for a long time. So where should he go?
    California, here I come? But why? He would not be the only one to wonder if the call to arms from Justicia y Paz had been a reaction to the theft of the sacred picture or part of a coordinated effort. Traeger had requested, and received, what the Company had on Miguel Arroyo, an e-mail now snug in the computer he had been issued. He had read it in a truck stop just after crossing the Mississippi. An alliance between Arroyo and Grady was improbable enough to be possible. One the fiery exponent of the history of the Southwest and California, the whipper-upper of frenzy among illegal immigrants, now claiming the territory for its original settlers in a delayed victory for the conquistadores; the other the chauvinist Grady, who seemed to have forgotten that his family was only a couple generations out of County Mayo. One thing they had in common was pride in a supposed purity of blood. Arroyo claimed descent from sixteenth-century Spaniards who had settled in California, arriving from Mexico City shortly after 1529. That was the year of the Virgin’s apparition to Juan Diego, as Arroyo boasted. Grady, on the other hand, was proud of being, as he put it, pure Irish, which probably meant a mixture of Celt and Dane and French and who knew what else. When Traeger thought of it, the great globe itself seemed always to have been the theater of constant migration, emigration, and immigration, making the idea of pure blood dubious. But why would Grady ally himself with someone whose aims seemed diametrically opposed to his own: open versus closed borders? He