Beneath a Panamanian Moon (5 page)

“The red, sir. It matches your eyes.”

“Now, son, this is no way to begin Christmas.”

“You'll excuse me if I'm a little grumpy, sir. I had no place to sleep last night.”

“You remember when I got you transferred out of Special Services and into psychological operations?” Apparently Mr. Smith wanted to stroll down memory lane rather than confront my gorilla-filled present. When I didn't answer he said, “Humor me, son.”

I nodded. “I remember.”

“No one thought you were worth a cup of warm spit. But I knew better. And with time you acquitted yourself. And who taught you how to combine your piano-playing skills with other skills that made your service important to the security of this nation? Who did that?”

“You did, sir, for which I am very grateful, but this Panama thing, you didn't have to—”

Smith stopped me. “A good soldier who plays the piano. You are the only one I could send. And you gave me no choice.”

“But the Major's thugs nearly killed me.”

“I had faith.”

“Faith? That's all that was keeping me from being disemboweled for the holidays? Your faith?”

Smith stripped off the tuxedo jacket. His movements were careful, but casual. “Must be a good life for you here, son.”

“Up until last night.”

“And it can be again. All I want you to do is to find out a few things.”

I blew out a sigh and let the inevitability of the thing settle in for the first time. I was on my way to Panama, and the sooner I could finish the assignment, the sooner I could come back home.

Smith wiped his brow with a handkerchief, popped his collar stud, and said, “Follow me.”

We threaded our way through racks of costumes to a tiny, glassed-in space crowded with mannequins and bolts of fabric. Smith pulled out two folding chairs, opened them, and told me to take a seat. The room was so small that our knees nearly touched.

“You're a strange boy, son. But you've got real talent, and I'm not just talking about the piano.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But this. I want you to be prepared.”

“It's that bad?”

Smith leaned forward, his face inches from mine, and for the first time I saw worry in his eyes, an emotion I thought was alien to the old man. “Have you ever gotten over your aversion to firearms?”

“I just want to live where I don't need one. Like a normal person.”

“You almost got killed in St. Thomas because you're afraid of guns.”

“I'm not afraid of guns, and I didn't get killed in St. Thomas.”

“And in New York a few years ago?”

“If you'll allow me to indulge in a stereotype, sir, piano players don't usually shoot people. In fact, it's often the other way around.”

Smith didn't laugh like I'd hoped he would. Instead he rummaged around in a file cabinet and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He poured three fingers into a glass. “You want one, Harper?”

“No, sir. It's still a little early,” I said, glancing at my watch.

“Have a drink, Harper.”

There was something in his voice, an unaccustomed softness, even sympathy, that made me reconsider.

Smith reached into the drawer and pulled out another glass. We sat for a long time in the hot office and sipped warm Maker's Mark. I tried not to choke.

Smith poured himself a second and said, “You won't shoot anyone, is that right?”

“It's not that I won't. It's just that I'd rather not.”

“But you have.”

I closed my eyes and let the pictures pass. “Not to my credit.”

“The first one's the hardest,” Smith said. “That's the one you remember.”

That was a romantic lie. I remembered every one of them. In detail.

Smith put his drink down and folded his hands in his lap. “You know why I recruited you? I mean the first time? Because you have a way of disappearing in a room.”

“It's a function of the gig, sir. When you play background for parties, people don't notice you if you're good. It's part of the job.”

“And yet you always seemed to watch what was going on, even before we started working together.”

“My father taught me to play so that people could see my face.” I gave him a big, showbiz smile.

“Uh-huh.” Smith scratched his chest. “And you've always done a bang-up job for me, no complaints.”

“Thank you, sir. Something else my father taught me.”

Smith shook his head and said, “Don't bring your family into this, okay? It only makes it harder.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All I want you to do in Panama is find out who the guests are at this resort hotel and why they're there. Nothing else. If things get bad enough for you to give up your dislike of firearms, I want you to extract, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No fooling around.”

“No, sir. Not a bit.”

Smith pulled out a folder from the same desk drawer that held the bourbon. “The guests get flown in, a few at a time. The hotel has a Bell helicopter for commuting and a Huey they use for training security forces. You know, like corporate bodyguards. That's the story, anyway.” He handed me half a dozen eight-by-tens and asked if I knew what I was looking at.

“Satellite pictures,” I said. “Not a commercial satellite.” I was looking down at a cluster of beachfront buildings, their roofs red, the water blue, the small circles of umbrellas white.

“Notice anything unusual?” Smith handed me a loupe and I studied the photo.

“No people,” I said.

“Why do you think there are no people on a beautiful sunny day at the beach?”

I looked up from the photo and said, “They know what time the satellite passes overhead.”

Smith nodded and handed me several more photos. These were pictures of what appeared to be an abandoned city block in the middle of a dense jungle. Only a few of the visible buildings had roofs, but one photo showed three military trucks.

“What is this?”

Smith shook his head. “That's what we'd like to know.”

I handed the photos back to Smith. “Major Cruz will be in Panama for New Year's. Do you think there's some connection?”

Smith nodded again. “I don't think it's a coincidence, if that's what you're asking. Other than that, I don't know. There does seem to be something big planned for New Year's Eve, that much we get from the chatter, but it could just be a big party for a lot of Colombians with money.”

“But you don't think so.”

“No, and one other thing. The men who make up the hotel staff don't exactly have a degree in hospitality. You know one of them, a Ren Vasquez. He's the one who recommended you in the first place.”

“Ren? My God, Ren's a great guy, but not exactly the most stable man on the planet.”

“And you've got backup there. He's a man named Ramirez, Phillip Ramirez. Was with the hundred and first. Tried out for Delta, was one of fifteen to finish the course and then turned down a position. Spent a few months in Iraq with special ops, got wounded bad enough for a discharge, and was in Walter Reed for six months, which is where he was recruited by our guys and theirs. I'm assured he's someone you can trust, and he knows you're coming.”

I wondered who else knew I was coming and what kind of welcome I'd receive. “You know anything about Panama, Mr. Smith?”

“I went to jungle school there. Caught crabs as big as beavers.”

I laughed, because that's what he wanted me to do, and it made him feel better.

“I know this. Since we left the place to the Panamanians, it's pretty much gone to shit. Drug money, the politics of the drug war, the Canal, it's all made the place as squirmy as an earthworm in the sun.”

“Yes, sir.” I swallowed a knot of bourbon.

He dropped his head and spoke so quietly that I had to lean forward to hear it all. “I want you to promise me you'll be careful.”

“I will, sir.”

“And Harper?”

“Yes?”

“Wear some sunblock, or you'll fry your ass off.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Smith promised me I could come home once I'd won the pony. All I needed was a guest list and a better understanding of who they were training and why, and I needed to know before New Year's Eve. But, in spite of the short deadline, Smith let me spend the rest of Christmas with my father, a bit of sentimentality that, coming from Smith, scared me more than mercenaries and unhinged third-world politics.

My father seemed happy to see me, but after he opened my gift, a scarf, we ran out of things to talk about and spent most of the day watching television. Dinner was take-out Chinese. When I told my father I was leaving for Panama, he said, “I was wondering how long it would be before they kicked you out of the nation's capital. What happened, you make a pass at the First Lady?” He wasn't joking. My father never joked about the First Lady.

The next day I was flying into Panamanian airspace, watching the green landscape zip by and thinking December in the tropics might not be so bad after all. I had camouflaged myself in shorts, sandals, a jade-green shirt with orange flowers, and Wayfarer sunglasses. I was ready for anything.

To my surprise, Panama City looked shiny and new from a few thousand feet up. This banana-Miami crowded the curve of a muddy bay and threw up modern skyscrapers the way northern Virginia tossed up Starbucks. The fact that the tall buildings were built on a cocaine foundation didn't make them any less impressive from the air.

Tocumen airport tried its best to live up to the skyline's cosmopolitan promise with native artwork displayed as cultural artifacts along the corridor that ran between the gate and baggage claim. Signs told me that I could find similar artifacts for sale in the gift shop. I would soon find out that everything in Panama is for sale.

At the baggage claim, Panamanian families embraced loudly, Anglo businessmen scurried off to customs, and tourists shouldered their bags and consulted their guidebooks. Among the tourists were two young men who seemed eager to buy dope in a place where all the laws are like Texas. As far as I could tell, I was the only one smuggling in a satchel full of Gershwin.

I waited by the luggage carousel and watched as bag after bag was claimed, the crowd dissipated, and I was alone, watching the belt grind by, empty. Six uniformed and two plainclothes cops watched me with some amusement as it became clear that my three tuxedos, patent-leather shoes, my studs, and my ties were off on their own adventure. It took an hour to file a claim. I didn't know the Spanish word for “luggage” and neither did the clerk. I pointed to one bag that looked similar to mine and she said, “Bueno,” and tried to give it to me. She was genuinely surprised when I declined.

My customs agent was eager to spread out everything I owned across her counter. Of the two of us, I think she was more disappointed about my lack of luggage than I was.

“What's this?” she asked.

“That's an MP3 player,” I said. “I wear it when I run.”

“And this?”

“My laptop,” I said.

Disappointed that it wasn't a bomb, she took my passport and went away for a very long time, leaving me alone with a dozen policemen armed with automatic weapons and an annoyed disposition.

When she returned, I stepped outside to the taxi stand. Nothing, not even Washington with summer air so thick you could cut it into seat covers, prepared me for the heat of Panama. And I could feel things—small, bacterial, fungal things—growing on me. I knew that if I set down my carry-on Coach bag it would sprout legs and scurry off into the underbrush.

A cab in neon green, yellow, and red pulled to the curb. I said I wanted to go to “the Chinaman's Drugstore.”

He looked at me and said, “You sure?”

I said I was, although I wasn't, and he shrugged, put the car into gear, and took off toward the city.

I amused myself by counting the pictures of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard and wondering what you had to do to rewire Christmas lights for twelve volts.

I tried not to be too concerned about the driver's reaction to the address I'd been given. I'd read the history of Panama on the plane and here I was, a beaming beacon of American middle class knowing that the locals had good reason to dislike all things gringo. For instance, one hundred years ago, when Colombia was reluctant to let us build our big ditch, Teddy Roosevelt carved Panama out of Colombia's backside and set up a malleable dictatorship. The United States claimed a large strip of land on either side of the Canal, and called it the Zone, and ran it like an American colony. The Panamanians soon began to resent the gringos. The Americans ran the Canal, hiring the locals to cut the lawns of their tidy homes and watch their tidy kids go off to their tidy schools. So the Panamanians rioted a few times, just to get the gringos' tight-assed attention. Once, they rioted over the name of a bridge.

When built, the bridge that arched over the Canal was either the Thatcher Ferry Bridge or the Bridge of the Americas, depending on who was talking. In the sixties some students tried to raise the Panamanian flag on the bridge, a riot followed, and several people, all Panamanians, were killed, shot dead by American soldiers. The Americans named the street Fourth of July Boulevard. After the riot, the Panamanians called it the Avenue of Martyrs.

Then there was that whole invasion-and-killing-and-leveling-a-large-part-of-the-city-while-snatching-Noriega thing. Some people still held a grudge about that, more than a decade later. Soreheads.

The driver turned off the wide main boulevard and into a two-lane street dedicated to the consumption of alcohol. From what I could see, many Panamanians were doing their best to keep the local bartenders employed. The store owners and clerks, free for siesta, lounged at small tables and eyed the gringo rolling by in the parrot-colored taxicab.