God's Favorite (23 page)

Tristan began sleeping next to Father Jorge and spent much of each day at his side, chatting in a friendly fashion despite the priest's limited ability to respond. Gradually Father Jorge realized that Tristan was guarding him against the sexual advances of Lucho and the other men. “You know what they charged me with?” Tristan told him one night. “Nothing! There's a new calumny law that allows them to lock up a person for five years in preventive detention just for being accused of slander. Isn't that absurd? Maybe that's what they've done with you, Father. All those masses you said for Hugo—they're getting even with you for that.”

“Not even a hearing?” the priest asked through his clenched teeth. His only hope of getting word to the Nuncio was that he would be charged with a crime and allowed to enter a plea. That much would be on the public record. It had never occurred to him that he could remain here for years with no hope of being heard. He looked at some of the long-timers and imagined himself with a scraggly gray beard down to his navel.

One day he lay on his hammock with his feet raised against the wall. He had tried to keep his feet elevated after awakening to find a rat gnawing at his wounds. The rats and the prisoners lived in a surly coexistence. There was so much marijuana in the prison that the rats wandered around in a half-stoned state, boldly slaking their thirst from the bowl of the toilet. The rodents had a distinct family hierarchy. For a week or so there were only three regular rat visitors to the cell, but then the fourth one reappeared. The priest noticed that her teats were enlarged; she must have a nest of babies somewhere. Soon there would be an entire new litter to contend with. He watched the mother rat sniffing about under the hammocks, looking for shoes. They ate anything leather—for the salt, he supposed.

“Goddamn vermin!” Lucho screamed. He suddenly snatched the mother rat up by the tail and held it in front of his face. “You think you can get away with that?” The rat was squirming and snapping the air, but then stopped to look at Lucho as he yelled at it. They were probably both stoned, the priest thought; otherwise, the rat would not have let itself get caught. There was also something weird in the moment that passed between Lucho and the rat, as if there were a remote chance of communication, before Lucho swung the animal by its tail and brained it against the bars.

“Fuck, Lucho, you made a mess!” one of the criminals cried, wiping rat blood off his face.

The madmen across the hall came back to life, screaming at Lucho. They apparently regarded the rats as pets. They cursed and cried. Lucho taunted them by holding the carcass outside
the cage, then he flipped it toward them. But the rat struck the bars of the other cage and then lay in the hallway, still seeping blood.

“Great, Lucho, now it's going to stink up the place!”

Lucho turned and hit the man who complained, then pressed his hands against the man's throat. “You want me to do the same to you?” The muscles swelled in Lucho's massive arms and his copper bracelet glinted in the faint yellow light. When he let go, the man dropped to his knees and coughed up blood.

For a while the men in the cage were quiet. They were all wary of what was going to happen next. Eventually the food cart arrived and Lucho came to the priest with his bowl of soup.

“You need to eat more, Father, you're getting too thin,” he said. “The others will give you their soup as well.”

“This is enough,” the priest murmured.

Lucho touched Father Jorge's thigh. “You are like a broomstick. It's not attractive. You will eat what I say.”

“He's doing what he can, Lucho,” Tristan said evenly. “You cannot force a man to eat more than he can keep down.”

Lucho darkened and looked as if he were going to strike the older man, but instead he turned to Father Jorge and kissed him fully on the lips. “Remember, I'm the one who is taking care of you. If you want protection, you have no choice.” Then he glared at Tristan and walked away. Tristan looked helplessly at the priest. There was nothing to say.

Father Jorge slept fitfully. He could still feel Lucho's lips on his, no matter how often he wiped his mouth. The kiss posed questions about himself that he did not want to face. He was frightened of Lucho but more frightened of the longing that the kiss had awakened.

“Get up, Father,” the pudgy guard said. He was holding a set of leg chains.

“What are you doing?” Lucho asked furiously.

“They want him,” the guard said simply.

“He's mine!” Lucho said. “We have an agreement!”

The guard shrugged. He was a pig-faced man with eyes that were too indifferent to be thought of as cruel. “I have no control over this,” he said. “They want the priest.”

Father Jorge still had not moved.

“Get up,” the guard said again as he opened the cage.

Lucho took a few menacing steps toward the open gate, but then he suddenly stopped and slumped onto his cot and began to cry.

Father Jorge tentatively put his bare feet on the floor. He had not walked more than a few paces in a long time, and just standing made him feel faint. When he put weight on his feet, pain shot all the way through his body and into his shoulders. The madmen were strangely quiet. The guard fastened the irons around his legs. The chains were absurdly unnecessary; he was far more hobbled by his feet.

The stairwell was full of blinding sunlight, but instead of going up into the courtyard, the guard led him down the steps, into a lower basement. The hallway was almost black, but there was a room with a bare yellow bulb, and the guard pushed him toward the crack of light coming from the half-opened door.

The floor of the room was covered with stained sawdust, stinking of the blood that had already been shed there. A large man with a club in his belt gave him an appraising look, then smiled dismissively. “Sit,” he said.

Father Jorge sat in an armless wooden chair in the center of the room under the light.

The large man suddenly started coughing. He took an inhaler from his pocket and gave himself two quick bursts, and when he spoke his voice sounded high and wavery, as if he had been breathing laughing gas. “We have some questions for you, which you will answer. Don't think about the alternative. I realize that you are a priest, but that doesn't mean anything to me. I will gladly treat you just as we have treated the others—even worse if it suits me. Answer our questions and you can go. If you have any ideas about resisting us, put them out of your mind.
You can make it easy or we can make you regret you were ever born.”

There were no instruments of torture that the priest could see. The pudgy guard and the other man both had clubs. He supposed that was all they needed. A few feet away a woman with a steno pad took a sharpened pencil from her purse and gave him an expectant look. In his cell, Father Jorge had rehearsed how he would respond to this moment. He had decided to face death with as much courage as he could summon.

“What do you want to know?” the priest asked. He was shocked at himself. The words seemed to come out of his mouth unbidden, as if they had their own right to exist. Within twenty minutes he had given them all the names that he could remember. He was surprised he had so little to say. His shame was great, but his longing for life was greater. Later he would believe that the splash of sunlight in the stairwell had undone him. After another hour the man with the inhaler opened the door and the pig-faced guard led him outside. His eyes filled with tears in the sunlight. He was free, but he was no longer the same man. No, he would never be the same man.

T
HE NUNCIATURE WAS
subdued despite the many refugees who usually liked to congregate in the hallway or drink coffee and play bridge with the Nuncio in the dining room. For the past week the guests had been scrupulously silent, tiptoeing and whispering to keep from disturbing Father Jorge. Sister Sarita had been a nurse in her youth, and she had skillfully lanced the infection in his feet and extracted the remaining shards of glass. The bones of his jaw had begun to knit back together, but the priest was still in constant pain. One of the refugees, the owner of a Jaguar dealership, made a telephone call and soon a small package arrived at the nunciature. Sister Sarita took it into the kitchen, where the Nuncio found her mixing white powder into a saucepan.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“Heroin,” she said nonchalantly.

“Sister! Holy Mother of God! You can't have such things in this place! Of all things!”

“It's a narcotic, like any other he would have if you would let him go to a real hospital,” she said defiantly. “And if you think I'm going to let that beautiful young man suffer any more without painkillers, you are very much mistaken.”

The Nuncio bit his tongue. He didn't want to let Father Jorge out of his sight, and he depended on Sister Sarita to take care of him.

Soon Father Jorge was resting better, although an intermittent fever still raged. Except for the penicillin and heroin injections, the Nuncio took on most of the nursing tasks himself. Some redness and signs of infection still remained, but after a few days the swelling subsided. Father Jorge slept and slept. It was as if he didn't want to be awake. Whenever he came to, they stuffed him with bouillon and Jell-O.

The Civic Crusade met Tuesday evenings in the library of the nunciature. These gatherings had become increasingly crowded, in part because of the refugees, who were always present, but also because the resistance movement had been revitalized by the American attempts to remove General Noriega from power. Spontaneous strikes and protests broke out nearly every day despite the brutality of the PDF. Noriega's spies planted rumors at a Lions Club luncheon that any demonstrator who was sent to La Modelo a second time would be raped by prisoners with AIDS. Most people thought it was a characteristic bit of psychological warfare on the General's part, but there were enough infected prisoners to make the threat sound credible. In any case, no one who had been there wanted to return.

One day, with no prior notice, the trial of Roberto Díaz Herrera came on television, interrupting a game show. A nun came running to the Nuncio and told him to turn on his set. Until then no one had known what had happened to Roberto since the attack
on his mansion. Most people thought he had been killed, so the trial caught everyone by surprise. It was a weird piece of political stagecraft. The prosecutor was a harried young woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who waddled around the courtroom with her hands pressed to the small of her back. She charged Roberto with “an attack against the internal personality of the state,” a crime no one had ever heard of. Finally the camera turned to the defendant. Roberto looked dazed but unmarked. The Nuncio suspected that he had been drugged. “Yes, I declare myself guilty,” Roberto said in a slurred voice. The whole affair was over in minutes. Roberto was transported to a military prison on Coiba, which was famous for the number of prisoners who had “hanged themselves” in their cells.

So the mood in the library was both grim and pragmatic. Most of the members of the Civic Crusade were unwilling revolutionaries, more comfortable in their boardrooms or drinking cocktails in the lobby of the Marriott. They were frightened by the dark road ahead and the prospect of violence, exile, and personal ruin. They were also chastened by the revolutions of Nicaragua and El Salvador and the damage that had been done to those tragic republics. Until recently, no one had believed that Panama would ever sink into that circle of hell, but they had been to enough funerals now to realize that anything could happen. They were not even certain that they were secure in the nunciature; if Noriega was willing to stoop to assassination, why should he hesitate to violate the sanctuary of a foreign embassy? A truckload of soldiers waited on the corner of Avenida Balboa, making this scenario seem very likely.

The last thing the civic leaders wanted was for the Left to seize control of the opposition; indeed, the great paradox was that Hugo Spadafora, the martyred symbol of the resistance, was the creature they feared most—a romantic leftist revolutionary. If Hugo had still been alive, nearly everyone in the library would have secretly sided with Noriega. They wanted something unthinkable in Central America, a bourgeois coup. It troubled the
Nuncio that the entire revolution seemed to be a revolt on the part of the white upper class against the mestizo lower class that Noriega represented.

Some of the most prominent businesspeople and political figures in the country were present, including some who had been bloodied in the streets or in Roberto's mansion: Guillermo Endara, a corpulent attorney whose black glasses were perpetually sliding down his nose; Aurelio Barría, president of the Chamber of Commerce, who had succeeded the murdered Serafín Mitrotti as head of the opposition; and Ricardo Arias Calderón, the stern and slender philosophy professor they called “the Monk” because of his ascetic habits. Arias Calderón had been waging a fearless and nearly solitary struggle against the military dictatorship most of his life. Even Naomi Amaya, the country's most famous madam, was present. The Nuncio secretly admired her as a formidable source of information.

Jack Tarpley, the American ambassador, also slipped in the now-famous back door of the nunciature, along with a political attaché and a security officer who scanned the library for listening devices before the meeting began. The Nuncio was astonished that nothing was found.

The ambassador began by describing American efforts to persuade General Noriega to leave Panama peacefully. They were two-pronged. One plan being developed with certain Panamanian exiles (whose names were not mentioned but were known to everyone) provided that Noriega and his top officers would step down and new elections would be held. The negotiations were currently snagged on the question of the General's indictment on drug charges in Florida. Noriega wanted the indictment quashed; the Reagan administration was reluctant to interfere in an independent legal proceeding, even though it seemed unlikely that the General would ever face trial. Some monetary inducements surfaced to sweeten the deal. While that line was being pursued, the administration had also frozen all Panamanian assets in the United States. The strategy, as the ambassador explained
it, was to paralyze the Panamanian economy and make it impossible for General Noriega to operate.