Beneath a Panamanian Moon (6 page)

The driver stopped at a corner wine store, open on two sides and cooled by the ocean breeze blowing across white tile. The driver pointed and said, “This is the Chinaman's Drugstore.”

“This is?”

“Yes. This is.”

“Okay.” I gave him twenty dollars. He didn't offer me change. I got out and waited by the doorway.

A short man in a straw hat, his face round, his eyes red-rimmed, stood next to me. “Hey,
muchacho
. You need a ride?”

“No, I'm waiting for someone.”

“You looking to get high?”

“No, no, thanks.”

“You want a woman?”

“No.”

“You want a man?”

I had to laugh. “No, I'm okay.”

“Where you going? I take you anywhere you want to go, five bucks.”

“Take me to New York,” I said.

He liked that. “I go to New York,” he said with a smile, “and I never come home. There are plenty of fine women in New York.”

“Yes, fine women.”

“Where you going? Come on, I take you there for three bucks, no tip.”

I looked at my watch. The luggage ordeal had made me late. Maybe my ride had come and gone. “You know La Boca del Culebra?”

A cloud rolled across the sun and the entrepreneur's disposition darkened. “That's a bad place, amigo. Come on, let me take you to a nice hotel. We got Hilton, we got everything. Nice places, not like La Boca.”

“I have a job there,” I said.

The little man stiffened. “You? You work there?” Then he laughed. “Oh, you make a joke. Ha ha, very funny man. Come, I take you to a nice hotel.”

“What's wrong with La Boca?”

“Yeah, slick, what's wrong with La Boca?”

Neither of us had seen him approach. A tall, tanned man in his late twenties clasped the cab driver's shoulder and squeezed it until his knuckles went white.

The cab driver shook his head. “Nothing, señor. La Boca is a fine place. Very nice. I give it five stars.” He slid out from under the new man's grasp and backed away. With a tip of his straw hat, he hurried off.

The tall man looked down at me. He wore a black baseball cap, dark glasses, and dangled an unlit Camel between his lips. “You the piano player?”

“Yeah.”

He tilted his head and took me in from my sandals to my Hawaiian shirt. “You always dress like this?”

“Like what?”

“Never mind.” He pointed at my satchel. “Is that it?”

“They lost my bag.”

“Fucking airlines. Come on, we'll fix you up.”

I followed him into the street to a Jeep made about the same time Smith was in his first firefight outside of Da Nang. “Get in,” he said.

I did.

The tall man wheeled the Jeep around in a one-eighty, drove up to the Avenue of the Martyrs, and turned left toward the bridge that had united the continents and divided the people forty years before. The Bridge of the Americas spanned the Pacific entrance to the Canal, hundreds of feet above the shipping lanes. Far below, freighters waited their turn through the locks. At the very horizon, a lake plucked from prehistory shimmered in the sun.

For the first time since we started, the driver spoke. “They call me Zorro. Like the movie.”

“They call me Harper,” I said. “Like the movie.”

“There was a movie?”

“With Paul Newman.”

“No shit. Is it any good?”

“Yeah. I thought so.”

The road was built to withstand the constant rain, but not well, and the seams of hot tar thumped against the tires.

“What's your favorite?” Zorro asked.

“Favorite movie? That's a tough one. I'd guess
Citizen Kane
.”

“Never saw it.”

“Dr. Strangelove?”

“Nope.”

“So what do you like?”

“Steven Seagal,” Zorro said. He held the cigarette between his lips, drove with his elbows, and cupped a lighter against the wind. “What else?”

“It Happened One Night.”

“Nope. How about
Con Air
?”

“Didn't see it. What about
Bringing Up Baby
? Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn?”

“That in black-and-white?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't watch black-and-white. What about the scariest movie you ever saw?”

I thought about that a minute. There was
Psycho,
and
Silence of the Lambs
, and
Sunset Boulevard.
I said, “I don't know, what about you?”

“All the President's Men,”
he said, and gave me a sideways smile as if he'd been jerking me along. “So really, what do you like? I mean, if you could see any movie you wanted, what would it be?”

There was no hesitation.
“The Big Lebowski.”

Zorro nearly drove off the road. “I love that movie.” He bounced the heel of his hand off the steering wheel, “Yeah!”

We had found common ground. The Dude. I pulled my shirt away from my body and said, “Is it always this hot?”

“Not at night. When it rains you can freeze your ass off.”

“Does it rain much?”

“Yeah. A lot.”

“I read there was a rainy season.”

“Uh-huh. But even in the dry season it rains every day. Once at one o'clock for about an hour, and again at nine.” Zorro pulled off the main road and onto a rutted dirt track that ran through the jungle, the vegetation so thick and so close that wet fronds whipped the sides of the Jeep, soaking me to the skin.

“It's the dry season now,” Zorro said. “Otherwise it'd be raining.”

He twisted the wheel left and right, keeping expertly to the trail that was invisible beyond ten feet of the Jeep's hood. Several times on tight turns, the Jeep went up on two wheels. “These old things flip,” Zorro said. “Kelly keeps promising to get us a Hummer.”

It was dark under the green canopy and occasionally I saw a flat shadow skitter across the road.

“What the hell's that?”

“Land crab. When they breed they cover the whole fucking highway. They're useless as tits on a nun. Can't drive over 'em 'cause they'll pop the tires, and you sure can't eat 'em.”

“What do you do for the hotel?”

“Security.”

“Many guests?”

He stared at me longer than was safe considering our speed. The Jeep went up on two wheels again, nearly pitching me into the brush. “Whoa,” Zorro said. “That was a rush.”

“I play piano,” I said, after I'd pried my fingers from the dash.

“I know,” he said. “You'll be assigned to Cooper's team. He's another new guy. We're short because of Rosebud.”

I didn't think I'd heard correctly over the engine and the sound of my own heart pounding in my ears. “Because of what?”

“Rosebud,” he said. “He got eaten by an alligator. He was a friend of mine.”

“I'd heard it was a shark.”

“Alligator,” he said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It's okay. He was a great guy but couldn't play piano worth a shit.”

I wondered if there was a cause-and-effect thing happening here, but I didn't ask.

Zorro drove with his knees while he lit another cigarette. “You any good?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

He laughed, but didn't let me in on the joke.

We approached the gates of La Boca and stopped at the guardhouse. A blond man, with shoulders you could screen IMAX on, ambled out and said, “This the new guy?”

“This is him.”

The guard, whose flowered shirt and khaki slacks softened the hard lines of his HK submachine gun, looked me up and down as if I were a new item on the menu and decided, “He doesn't look so hard.”

“You won't say that when he drops a piano on your ass,” Zorro said, and then they both laughed.

The guard looked at his watch, then at the sky. “Best get your butts inside. Flyover's in three.”

After we'd driven away I asked, “Who was that?”

“Meat,” Zorro said.

“Meat?”

“Yeah. He's the social director.”

“What'd he mean by ‘flyover'?”

“Satellite,” Zorro said, and drove quickly along a street lined with palm trees. Overhead, an iguana the length of my arm jumped from one tree to the next. On my right, beyond a hedge, I caught glimpses of whitecaps and waves, glittering as they curled toward a shallow beach. We passed a central garden of hibiscus, gardenia, and bougainvillea.

We passed a tennis court. Men, tanned and dressed in blinding white, stopped playing and hurried into the shade of an open bar. Men on a putting green looked skyward and walked toward a shelter beneath the trees.

“We stay in the hotel with the guests. Wait staff and groundskeepers have their own building up beyond the courtyard. The guests' own security staff, the students, live in separate barracks not far from here.”

“Students?”

“You'll see.”

The
bap
of the Jeep's engine startled a flock of parakeets and they exploded from a treetop. A spider monkey loped across the road and watched us as we parked in front of the hotel.

This was the resort, a jungle hideaway built for the rich who, distracted by the demands of World War II, never came. It was a three-story monument to Deco extravagance with a high, wide veranda surrounding the first floor. I had seen this place before, but only from above.

“Welcome home,” Zorro said. “Now get inside. We've got less than a minute.”

“I will.”

“See Ren. He'll fix you up with some clean clothes until the fucking airline finds your fucking bag.”

“Thanks.”

Zorro looked at his watch again and said, “You want to be inside, new guy.”

“Right.” I snatched my satchel out of the back as Zorro popped the clutch and pulled away, raising dust in the sun.

I walked through the double screen doors and into the hotel lobby. No one was at the front desk, so I took a minute to look around. I checked, but there was no hotel register conveniently lying around for me to scan. The movies make this spy work seem easy. It's not.

Off to the side was the front office. I knocked.

A small fluorescent lamp illuminated a man hunched over a computer keyboard, pecking out letters one finger at a time. Without looking up he said, “You know where the
x
is on this thing?”

“Bottom row, to your left.”

He looked, found it, and hit it with his forefinger, then checked the screen to make sure the
x
hadn't been mislaid somewhere in the circuitry.

He was another Latino, like Zorro, but rounder, with a boy's face. His black hair was slicked back and he had a dime in one ear. His right ear. “Ren?”

He looked up, irritated, but as soon as he saw me his face brightened. “Harper, my man.” Ren jumped up, we did the dap, fists and knuckles, just like he'd taught me, and then he hugged me, one armed, pulling me in close to his chest. “Dude, man, you looking good.”

“You, too, Ren. So what's up? Last I heard you were getting your ass shot at in Iraq.”

“Yeah, the hajjis thought they had me up a tree, you know? Throwing rocks. But I got out of there, man, and one of my old-time bros got me this gig here where I don't get shot at and I make a lot more money.”

“What the hell are you doing behind a keyboard?” I said, pointing to the computer. Ren had a lot of skills, most of them criminal in any society not openly engaged in combat, but typing was not one of them.

Ren shrugged. “They figure I can fuck up less in here.” Ren sat down again and said, “Let me finish up this letter, okay, and then I'll show you where to bunk.”

While Ren searched the keys, I wandered back into the lobby, past two dying palms, and heard the murmur of conversation. I looked into a dining room. A dozen guests sat at tables covered in white linen drinking icy drinks and grazing on cold meats and yellow fruits.

Not unusual in any resort hotel, except that every guest was male and every male was a Latin man between thirty-five and fifty. Was this the secret? Was this what caused the Washington intel community to ponder over satellite pictures and Panamanian autopsies?

Was this a resort for middle-aged gay men?

And then a cute waitress in a short white jacket and swirling black skirt came out of the kitchen and every eye was on her like a bird on a bug and I knew that these men were not gay. These men were in training. And from the testosterone that filled the air, so thick it threatened to warp the veneer off the Baldwin upright in the corner, these men had been in training for some time. It was like football camp or basic training or one of those corporate team-building getaways where bespectacled CFOs bare their male breasts and beat on drums in the firelight.

I walked across the dining room, stopping conversation as I passed, and sat at the piano. I stretched my fingers, aware that every eye in the room was on me. I opened the keyboard, cleared my throat, and began to play “Someone to Watch Over Me,” in honor of the surveillance cameras. I was barely into the opening bars before Ren grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the lobby. There was no applause.

“Dude. You must be crazy,” he said. “Don't ever do that.”

“I was hired to play the piano. There was a piano. I played.”

“Yeah, right, but you don't play if somebody is in there.” He dragged me into the office and took a deep breath to calm himself. “You do that again and they'll kill you, man, and that would be bad because I don't know any more piano players. Okay?”

Back inside the office, Ren straightened the collar of my shirt and said, “Now, let's get you in to see the Colonel. He's waiting and he gets unhappy when he has to wait for anything, especially some piano-playing
pendejo
. And you want to keep the Colonel happy,” he said. “It's good for everyone.”