God's Favorite (3 page)

“It's exquisite,” Kiki said in a hoarse whisper.

“This is true. He also rents me this villa, but he charges me so much I wonder if I can afford his generosity. Now I learn that he has closed down our new processing lab—a world-class facility, the finest I have ever seen, a work of great genius. Twenty-three of my workers captured—highly skilled men, men with families—taken off to jail. As if they had no protection. As if they had no assurance from me of their safety.”

“This is wrong,” said César indignantly. “Most definitely a very wrong thing.”

“Yes, it is. And now I want that you deliver a message to the General,” said Escobar, his face turning black with fury. “You tell that little wart he's going to die! Right here! I'll rip out his balls! I'll feed his liver to the house cat! Do you think he can understand that? This is
business!
” With that, Pablo Escobar hurled his prized Ming vase through the picture window, sending shards of glass into the hibiscus and scattering hummingbirds into the sky.

D
R
. J
ÜRGEN
S
PRACHT
, the world-famous Swiss dermatologist, carefully unwrapped the gauze from the face of one of his most difficult cases—M.N., as he was known in the medical literature, a middle-aged Latin man badly scarred by multiple lesions of acne vulgaris that continued to erupt long after adolescence. It was a challenging case, one that Spracht had been working on for nearly a dozen years with admittedly modest success.

“Ja,”
he said as the gauze lifted to reveal a raw red scab covering the patient's entire face. “It's clearing, it's definitely clearing.”

The patient started to smile, but the scab cracked like a boiled egg. M.N.'s eyes registered a bolt of pain.

“Not moving ist best,” advised Dr. Spracht. “No expression. Even talking
ist nicht so gut.
”

The patient grunted in response.

“Now the nuss will apply special ointment, and we will bandage all over again. Agweed? No movement.”

As a blond nurse in a gratifyingly tight lab coat leaned over and began to swab a stinging green unguent on the throbbing wound, ignoring the muzzled cries of pain, the door opened, and a very alarmed receptionist stuck her head in. “There's an emergency call for General Noriega!” she announced.

“I am busy,” the patient said through clenched teeth.

“It's the
president
of Panama,” the receptionist exclaimed in an awed voice.

“Nicky, what the fuck do you want?” the patient asked as Dr. Spracht held the phone to his ear.

On the other end of the line there was a brief transatlantic pause, then President Nicolás Ardito Barletta responded, “Tony, I have serious news. Something very important has come up. Incidentally, Roberto is also on the line.”

“Hi, Tony!” said Roberto Díaz Herrera, the colonel who was second in command of the Panama Defense Forces.

“What is the problem?” Tony demanded.

“Hugo Spadafora has been murdered,” Barletta said in a strangely neutral tone of voice.

“Good,” said Tony. “This is good.”

“Uh, yes, of course we agree, but the people are not taking it so well,” Barletta continued. “I don't know if you can hear the honking outside. I'm holding the phone out the window for you.”

Tony listened to the cacophonous traffic outside the presidential palace and the distant chanting of his name.

“There is great agitation,” Roberto added unhelpfully. “The people hold you responsible.”

“Listen, Nicky, I can't talk about this now,” said Tony. “You should call me in New York next week.”

“Next week!” said Barletta.

“Tony, what we're saying is that the situation in Panama is very unstable,” said Roberto. “Maybe it is more important for you
to be here than in Paris, or Switzerland, or New York, or whatever.”

“We think either you should come home right away, or else . . .” Barletta's voice trailed away significantly.

O
R ELSE
?” The threat implicit in that phrase echoed in Tony's mind as his limo crawled through the Geneva traffic. What did they think of him—that he would abdicate? Live the rest of his life in Switzerland? Who did they think they were dealing with? Did Nicky and Roberto imagine that they could run Panama without him? The thought would have made Tony laugh if the consequences weren't so painful.

His thoughts flew about in confusion. Hugo dead. Tony's nemesis gone. Out of his life. Out of life itself. It should be an occasion to rejoice. It was certainly an opportunity to reflect on the nature of divine justice. Hugo had been everything Tony was not: tall, handsome, rich, loved. And now dead, a nothing, his fame turned to vaporous memory. Delicious victory, especially after the noise that Hugo had made about Tony and the narcos, the threats he had made on the radio, the “proof” he had boasted about having in that little book of his.

But panic was banging on the door demanding to be admitted. Hugo—dead! Everyone would blame Tony for it. They already were! Something enormous had shifted in Tony's universe, and only God knew how it would throw the planets out of alignment. A little change was containable. Too much change made everything crazy.

But in any case, he had a more pressing concern impatiently awaiting for him at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Tony glanced at his watch and shuddered.

Twenty minutes later, the limo came to a halt in front of BCCI's imposing Geneva headquarters, and Tony darted out, carrying a weighty valise.

“Four o'clock!”

Tony periscoped his head toward the sound of that stonyhearted voice. There she was, sitting on a divan, surrounded by shopping bags and stroking the head of the dead fox attached to the fur around her shoulders: Felicidad, his formidable wife, staring at him with the eyes of an assassin.

“You said to meet you here at four o'clock and you show up at ten to five!” Her voice echoed in the oddly rapt lobby.

“Sweetness, the traffic—”

Felicidad made a clucking, dismissive sound that caused Tony's knees to go weak. “But I have arranged a surprise for you,” he pleaded. “This is something I am sure you will appreciate.”

“I've got a massage at six.”

“Please, dearest, this is most important to our future, I swear it.”

“This had better be worth it.”

A few minutes later Tony and Felicidad were seated in a small but luxurious conference room in the high-security subbasement, decorated with investment-quality folk art and hand-painted Haitian furniture.

“Very tasteful,” Felicidad decreed as she surveyed the room. “We should do this, Tony. We should do this in the den.” She seemed to be mollified by the prospect of extensive redecoration.

Tony nodded agreeably, although the thought of turning his den into a replica of a Swiss bank office filled him with—well, mixed feelings. On the one hand, how pathetic, how derivative, how frankly weird to come upon Caribbean handicrafts in this chilled subterranean Swiss vault; on the other hand, he had to admit, it looked better here, it looked like real art. A ghoulish frieze of skeletons tangoed on the painted tabletop. Life in death: it was so primitive, so unreconstructed, so strangely powerful now that Tony saw it out of context. Perhaps something in the cold Swiss soul longed for chaotic tropical vitality. Tony considered himself an expert on the Swiss, since he had been coming here annually for a decade now, both to do his banking and for the spa where Felicidad got massages and Tony received Dr.
Spracht's savage facial treatments–and also fetal-tissue injections that gave Tony a more or less continual erection. Of course, the Swiss claim they don't deal in voodoo, but Tony recognized magic when he saw it. He would have to get the recipe for those injections.

It occurred to him that there was a correspondence between his own radical Latin soul and the mountain-bound conservatism of these magical, cheese-eating blonds. Perhaps he should stay here after all, he reflected; life would not be so bad. Here, in frumpy Geneva, Tony could experience his own Swissness. He, too, had a longing for neutrality. He, too, yearned to step out of the arena of conflict, to achieve the spiritual contentment that seemed so native to the curtained horizons of Europe's dairyland. He supposed it was mere cultural difference that allowed this bank, which had been established for the sole purpose of hiding drug profits from Colombia and stashing away large portions of the Third World GNP in numbered accounts, to appear so respectable, so within the bounds, so spiritually untroubled.
“Pecunia non olet,”
the bankers liked to say: money doesn't smell.

Presently the door opened and a nervous young teller appeared. Behind her was a bulky man in shirtsleeves and an apron who was pushing a heavy metal cart. The man in the apron took a quick glance at the General, then cast his eyes into middle space as he pushed the cart into the conference room. Tony waited until the bankers were gone, then he opened the valise and dumped $13 million on the table.

Felicidad looked at him with scorn. “Tony, did you think you could buy me off?”

That, of course, was exactly what he had thought. He took a key from his pocket and opened the vault on top of the cart. There were stacks of currency inside, mounds of it—dollars, francs, yen, marks—and a dozen shining gold ingots. Tony lifted one of the gold bars and pressed it over his head like a dumbbell. “Heavy,” he said, noticing that the underside of the bar was stamped with a swastika.

Felicidad drew the fox close around her shoulders despite the thin bead of perspiration that had formed on her upper lip.

“Tony, what is this?”

“Money. Lots and lots of money.” Tony casually began to stack the new currency into the vault.

“But where did it come from?” Felicidad asked hesitantly. Her breath was shallow and faint.

“Hard work. Investments. A few gifts. It's retirement benefits, mainly.”

“They could hang you for this.”

“I didn't
steal
it! People give me things—it's part of my job to do favors, and in return, they give me little donations.”

“Tony, this is a lot of favors.”

“Many favors, many donations.”

“I don't want to know the details,” Felicidad said as she cautiously fanned through a bundle of thousand-yen notes. “And what do you expect from me, with all this?”

“Understanding. Patience. Perhaps a little forgiveness. A man like me, I am not so perfect, but you must admit there are compensations. Take that into account, that is what I am saying.”

“Even so, Tony, the power, all this money—it's not infinite, you know.”

“Not infinite, but isn't it enough?”

“Tony, you ask for the forgiveness of a saint. I am not a saint. How many times you have wronged me! Did you expect to buy me, like one of your whores?”

“Fela, I ask you please to respect the fact that I have made you one of the richest women in the world. It is not so small a thing.”

Felicidad looked at Tony and then at the mountain of cash and bullion. “You have been a good provider, this I agree. So I can tell you this much: what's in the past is past.”

“That is all I ask,” Tony said gratefully.

“But do not expect that this pardons even one more sin against me or your family!”

“No, of course . . .”

“You can ask this only once, Tony. The slate is clean. From now on, you must behave yourself. Do not try to find the end of my patience—it is very near!”

Tony put his hand over his heart. “Fela, I swear to you, from this day forward, I am a new man.”

T
HE FUNERAL
procession for Dr. Spadafora began at the airport, where the plane carrying his body from Costa Rica arrived at noon. Thousands waited for him, including many of his comrades from the Victoriano Lorenzo Brigade who had fought with Hugo in Nicaragua against the Somoza dictatorship and then with the Miskito Indians against the corrupt Sandinistas. The spies in the crowd worked furiously, snapping up anecdotes like sharks feeding in a fertile lagoon. “He came to my house with a briefcase,” said one of Hugo's many beautiful lovers. “He said he could prove Tony was in bed with the narcotraffickers. And he patted the briefcase like a pet.”

“Someone said he implicated the CIA as well.”

“Is it surprising? Tony and the CIA are together in everything else.”

“Certainly this could not have happened without the Americans agreeing to it. They must have wanted Tony to put a stop to the threats.” Heads nodded. Nothing transpired in Panama without the Americans being involved.

The motorcade brought the city to a standstill. The Nuncio
watched with great concern as the procession stretched along Avenida Balboa like a lizard's tail. He knew that Father Jorge was in the lead vehicle with the Spadafora family. His young secretary had been chosen to preach the funeral oration.

It seemed as if everyone in the country were either in the march or standing on the seawall, making the sign of the cross as the garlanded hearse carrying Hugo's headless corpse passed by. No one had ever seen such a public outpouring—not even upon the death of Omar Torrijos. And as the crowd mourned Hugo, they also mourned that former time, which now seemed so innocent. Under Torrijos, political dissidents might have been jailed or exiled, but they were rarely murdered. Until now, the country had avoided the savage civil wars that had ravaged Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The people had not known, when Torrijos died, what would follow. Now they knew.

Of course, they remembered that Torrijos himself had thrown Hugo in La Modelo prison, but even that action now appeared harmless, almost playful. When Hugo had come back from Africa, where he was fighting with the guerrillas in Portuguese Guinea, he had come to stir up revolt against Torrijos's military coup. But Torrijos being Torrijos—that is to say, cocksure and crazy—and recognizing these same qualities in the adventurous young medical man, he had often come to visit Hugo at La Modelo, preaching to him about his own vision for Panama, seducing him with his sympathy for the poor. Eventually he made Hugo the vice minister of health. If only Hugo had stayed in government service, people said, the destiny of Panama would have been different. But Hugo was by nature a fighter, not a civil servant. When the Nicaraguan rebellion began, Hugo formed his own freelance brigade and led his men into the jungle. Torrijos sent his own fifteen-year-old son, Martín, to join him. There Hugo learned about the secret network of pilots and jungle airstrips that the guerrillas had established to run guns to the Sandinistas. Noriega was using this
network to operate a private drug-trafficking ring. Hugo informed Torrijos and also warned him that Noriega was plotting against him. Perhaps if Torrijos had acted quickly, he might have saved himself and Hugo as well. But a few days later Torrijos's Dehavilland Twin Otter aircraft crashed into a hillside. The cause of the crash was never explained. Of course, everyone in Panama suspected the CIA's man in Panama and Omar's eventual successor, Manuel Antonio Noriega.