God's Favorite (2 page)

In his brief time here, the Nuncio had come to realize that there were really two Panamas, one of appearances and the other an underworld of secrets. There was, for instance, the nominal Catholicism that most of the country adhered to, and
yet behind that mask of orthodoxy there was a primitive and highly inventive spiritualism, which was everywhere—the country was steeped in it. The Nuncio could stand on his balcony and see the hand-painted buses rushing past with their vivid depictions of Indian legends and tribal gods. Nearly everyone he met in the country consulted a spiritual guide of some sort—an astrologer, a fortune-teller, a voodoo priest. He even knew some nuns who wore amulets around their necks, a practice he tried in vain to stamp out. The Nuncio had the feeling that modernity was a transitory condition in Panama, and that the country's magical past, like the jungle, was chewing at the margins, always threatening to break through and reclaim the vulnerable campsite of civilization.

From his balcony the Nuncio could also see the heavy freighters chesting through the Bay of Panama toward the canal. One could follow their wakes as they wobbled shoreward, until the waves crashed against the seawall at the foot of the towering financial district. This was one economy, built on shipping, import-export, duty-free shops, tourism, bananas, and the mighty American military presence. Behind the façade of legitimacy was another, much larger economy, one of numbered bank accounts and laundered drug profits. Smugglers and arms dealers swaggered through the hotel lobbies. Pilots for the drug cartels paraded through the jewelry stores on Via España buying gaudy trinkets with great green rolls of Yanqui dollars. Guerrillas who were engaged in one revolution or another sat at the same gaming tables with Middle Eastern weapons merchants and CIA officers and Colombian cocaine dealers. Like peacock tails, extraordinary fortunes opened themselves for display in the form of fantastic seaside palaces and country retreats. One took care not to inquire too closely about the sources of wealth or to comment on a sudden improvement in a person's financial status. In such an intimate nation, people tended to be complexly related by blood or marriage or both, so it was easy to give offense even to the most decent citizens.

Real political life had been smothered by two decades of military dictatorship, which hid behind a counterfeit democracy. There was a congress and a president who came to power through graft and fraud. Indeed, that was the whole point of political office. Most Panamanians accepted this with a shrug or a wink, as if the concept of government was a kind of genial farce, not to be taken seriously. The Nuncio supposed that this fatalism must be a predictable consequence of the artificiality of Panama's creation. The country had never had the opportunity to fight for its independence; it had simply been snatched away from Colombia by the Americans and fashioned into a surprised and awkward and wholly unprepared republic.

It was no accident that General Noriega had been chief of military intelligence before he made his grab for power. Intelligence was the one commodity everyone traded in this two-faced commonwealth. The Americans had listening posts burrowed into the green volcanic hills above the city, from which they could overhear conversations all over Latin America. Satellites and high-flying aircraft with high-speed lenses patrolled the skies. Antennae studded the mountains like the spines of a hedgehog. But the Americans were by no means the only spies in Panama. The Japanese and the Taiwanese depended on the canal as a lifeline to Europe, so they monitored every political development, spending millions each year to keep their interests alive and their paid lackeys in office. No one could even guess how many Cuban agents and informers there were in the country, not to mention the Mexicans and Colombians and Israelis and Russians and even South Africans. The entire country was like an espionage trade fair.

And the Nuncio loved it. He adored the secrecy, the scheming and plotting, the intricate connivings, the hidden meanings that made life in Panama a study in human duplicity. In this, his Vatican training served him well. After ten years in Panama, he had become the most recognized and trusted diplomat in the city, gaining a reputation for his craftiness and his access to juicy
intelligence—qualities deeply prized in a country that dines on gossip. Many of the Nuncio's sources were reporters, dissidents, or fallen political figures who had, at various times, come knocking at the back door of the old stone mansion at the corner of Avenida Balboa and Via Italia, where they might wait out the latest government purge. At this very moment the Nuncio was harboring at Vatican expense a columnist for
La Prensa
as well as two former members of the cabinet who had been there for nearly seven months, draining the wine cellar of many of its finest labels.

Aside from his network of political refugees and the deeply guarded but sometimes surprisingly useful information garnered from the confession box, the Nuncio had trained his staff to cultivate sources. Even the nuns brought in useful bits from time to time, rumors picked up from the schoolchildren—it was surprising what you could learn about a country by listening to its children—or complaints in the marketplace. But the Nuncio's prize student in the art of espionage was Father Jorge Ugarte, a handsome young Salvadoran whose talents reminded the Nuncio of himself nearly fifty years ago—cool, intelligent, and dispassionate. With training and encouragement, Father Jorge might attain the offices that the Nuncio himself had once aspired to. In fact, it was Father Jorge's step that the Nuncio recognized echoing in the marble hallway, and presently the handsome priest entered the room and shut the pocket doors behind him.

“It's raining,” Father Jorge announced superfluously. He was drenched. “Just the walk from the bus stop.” Without asking, he took a seat in the silver brocatelle wing-back chair opposite the desk.

The Nuncio started to protest, but thought better of it. He knew he had a reputation for being finicky; and besides, his affection for the young man inclined him to forgiveness. He thought Father Jorge one of the most interesting, attractive, and original young men he had ever met. Father Jorge had been orphaned in El Salvador during the cruelest civil war in Central
America and had taken refuge in a Catholic orphanage. The nuns, seeing his extraordinary promise and his natural piety, had arranged to send him to Madrid for schooling, where he was Europeanized and fashioned into an intellectual. A mestizo with dark Indian skin and liquid black eyes, which he hid behind round tortoiseshell glasses, Father Jorge still bore a slight trace of Castilian accent, which somehow added to his charm without making him appear at all pretentious.

“You've heard the news, of course.”

The Nuncio nodded. That very morning the city had been electrified by the report that Panama's most famous revolutionary, Dr. Hugo Spadafora, had been murdered.

“He was on his way to the capital to make charges against Noriega,” said Father Jorge. “Everybody knew that he had been promising to reveal the connections between the General and the narcotraffickers.”

“Yes, I heard him on the radio last week. He said he had a briefcase full of evidence. What do you know about it?”

“These remarks come to me privately, but they are not under seal,” Father Jorge said, betraying no emotion behind the shiny, round lenses. “Let us say they are observations of one who was intimate with a certain lieutenant.”

The Nuncio had given his secretary permission to spend part of each week ministering to the poor in El Chorrillo, a vast slum in the center of town that surrounded the Panamanian military headquarters. He thought it might add to his protégé's portfolio when the Holy See began looking for prospects. Happily, there was an unexpected dividend in this part-time assignment: many soldiers came to the Chorrillo parish to pray, as did their women—the wives and girlfriends and mistresses who were such invaluable sources of intelligence, especially for Father Jorge, whose dark good looks and scrupulous chastity made him a sought-after curiosity in female society.

“As we know, Hugo left Costa Rica on Friday, the thirteenth,” Father Jorge continued. “He took a taxi across the border and
had a serving of rabbit stew in a small cantina. Then he boarded a minibus for the capital. It appears that he got as far as Concepción. He was taken off the bus by a PDF officer and escorted to military headquarters. That is the last sighting of the living Hugo Spadafora. Three days later his headless corpse was discovered in a U.S. mailbag on the Costa Rican border.”

“Unburied?”

“Exactly, dumped on a riverbank, obviously meant to be found. By the way, I have secured the coroner's report,” said Father Jorge, trying to suppress the note of triumph in his voice as he passed the photocopied document to the Nuncio, who eagerly snatched it up. “As you can see, he was quite extensively tortured.”

“And raped, I see,” the Nuncio said as he examined the report, which was slightly damp from Father Jorge's clothing.

“Yes, apparently they severed his hamstrings so he couldn't resist. And when they finished they drove a stake up his ass.”

The Nuncio cast an uncritical but surprised look at his secretary, who never, in the Nuncio's memory, had ventured anything like a vulgarity. The impassiveness of the young priest's expression assured the Nuncio that he was merely speaking clinically, with his usual harrowing exactitude.

“At the end, a PDF cook cut off his head,” Father Jorge added.

“Are we to make anything of that?” asked the Nuncio.

“What do you mean?”

“The entire country is in love with witchcraft. No doubt they believe that there is some juju to be gotten from such practices.”

“I think it's just a show to terrify the masses.”

“Perhaps,” said the Nuncio, “but before the drug money came to Panama, Noriega would never have stooped to this. This is not his style.” He reached for one of Sister Sarita's sugar wafers and held it in front of him, as if it contained some vital mystery.

“But as long as he is out of the country, he can maintain that he knew nothing about the assassination.”

“I doubt that will help him.” The Nuncio placed the coroner's report in a slender drawer in the center of his desk, which he locked with a key he kept in the pocket of his cassock. “The great Hugo Spadafora,” he said meditatively. “You know, this time I think the Little General has gone too far.”

T
HREE FRIGHTENED
men entered the driveway of a handsome villa in Fort Amador, a former American military base that had been turned over to the Panama Defense Forces. A high stone wall topped with shards of colored glass surrounded the grounds. As the car approached, the iron gate opened to receive it, then abruptly shut behind it with a clang of doom.

The door chime played “Lara's Song” from
Doctor Zhivago.
Presently a shirtless butler in Bermuda shorts opened the door. “Mr. Escobar is expecting you,” he said with pity in his voice.

The three men—César Rodríguez, Floyd Carlton, and Kiki Pretelt—exchanged desperate glances, then followed the butler through the living room to the private office of Pablo Escobar, the chief of security for the Medellín cartel.

The office was tasteful but surprisingly modest for a man of Escobar's wealth and resources. House-decorating magazines covered the coffee table. The shelves were bookless, lined instead with eight-track tapes and exotic Oriental vases. The centerpiece of the room, Escobar's desk, was an elegant sheet of black slate. A paused Pac-Man game blinked on the computer screen. Behind the desk was a picture window opening on a resplendent garden. Hummingbirds dodged frantically through the blossoms.

Escobar was sitting on his Exercycle with a towel around his neck, watching CNN. He did not seem to notice the men when they came in. They stood nervously aside and listened to the reporter describing Panama as a drug haven and a sanctuary for internationally known mobsters, such as the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar. “Unlike many people here, Dr. Spadafora had the
courage to speak out against the criminal element of Panamanian society,” the reporter continued. “His death could mean the end of popular resistance to the Noriega regime, but judging from the reaction to his death, it is only the beginning.”

Escobar stopped pedaling.

“What do you want to drink?” he asked. “Strychnine or cyanide?”

Kiki collapsed, banging his head on the slate desk as he fell.

“Get him off my rug,” Escobar ordered. “He's bleeding on my fucking Karistan.”

Floyd and César pulled Kiki to his feet. His eyes rolled slowly back into focus.

“It was a joke,” said Escobar. “Ha, you should see your faces. You must have a very bad conscience to react in this manner.”

Kiki tried to speak, but his lips seemed to be glued together.

“Low blood sugar, Mr. Escobar,” said Floyd. “I think he missed breakfast.”

Escobar gave them all a look of such disdain that Kiki began to wobble again. Floyd and César held him up.

“The Bible says a man cannot serve two masters,” said Escobar, “but you work for me and you work for Noriega. The time has come to choose.”

“Mr. Escobar, there is no choice. You know our first loyalty is to you,” said César as the others nodded.

“ ‘Loyalty'—this is an interesting word,” Escobar said as he toweled off. He was a pudgy man with a frowning mustache. “Perhaps it means something different in Panama. In Colombia, when we pay a man for his cooperation, we get his cooperation. If he doesn't wish to work with us—okay! He doesn't take our money. But this! I give Noriega five million dollars. I entrust it to you. You tell me he appreciates it.”

“He was very grateful. I am sure of this,” César said.

“Yes, he even sends me this vase,” said Escobar, indicating a delicate blue ceramic, which resonated in a pleasing low hum as he traced his finger around its rim. “It's Ming, you know, one
of the finest pieces in my collection. Very rare, a genuine treasure.”