God's Favorite (36 page)

T
ONY, YOU KEEP
fucking up. Now you're really in trouble.”

Fidel's unwelcome voice was on the other end of the line. Tony listened impatiently. He was on his way out the door—a date with Carmen!

“A wing of American F-16s has just crossed our airspace,” Fidel continued. “Shit, we thought they were invading
us.
But they kept going. Which means they are headed your way.”

“Don't worry, they're not going to attack,” Tony said. “I've got Bush by the balls.”

“Okay, Manuel Antonio. But he doesn't seem to think so.”

Fidel's warning did little to dampen Tony's mood. He skipped out of his office and told his driver to step on it. He had told Carmen eight o'clock, and Fidel had made him late.

Carmen answered the door wearing blue jeans. “Oh, Tony, I forgot we were going out,” she said distractedly. Her hair was in a frayed bun. “Do you mind if we just order in? I've got to finish wrapping my shoes.”

Tony entered the bare apartment. To his astonishment, Carmen's lush environment had been erased. It was now an empty shell, like a theater after the set has been struck. The furniture was gone. There were shiny rectangles on the walls where pictures once hung. Even the drapes had been pulled down. Several dozen cardboard boxes were scattered across the room, taped and marked with an address in Florida. Tony felt like he was falling out of the sky.

“Where's your furniture?”

“It's all been sent to storage in Miami. For the first several weeks I'm going to be staying with my cousin.” Carmen went into her closet and emerged with an armful of shoes, which she began wrapping fastidiously in tissue paper. “She has an apartment in a really nice part of Miami Beach. Then when I get enrolled and everything, I'll find my own place.”

“Enrolled?”

“Tony, we talked about this, remember?”

“Well, I thought you had changed your mind.”

“I'm sorry you thought that, but it is not the case.” She stopped packing and looked at him with a serious expression that he could not quite read. She was wearing her glasses again, which made her look less sexy but somehow more deeply appealing.
The Carmen he knew was disappearing into those studious brown eyes.

“I'm really taking charge of my life now, Tony. This means everything to me.”

Tony slumped onto one of the boxes in confusion. The rules of love were so cruel and paradoxical. He laughed hopelessly.

“Is this funny?” Carmen asked.

“Funny? I guess it‘s funny that leaving me means everything to you and having you means everything to me. If you were going to break my heart, why did you save my life?”

Carmen knelt on the floor beside him and put her head on his knee. She was quiet a moment. “Maybe I need to find out what you really mean to me. I can't do that here, Tony. You don't give me any room to breathe. It has to be a choice for me. Here I feel like I've got a leash around my neck. I know you want me, but that's not enough. I have to want you to want me.”

“And you think that might happen in Miami?”

“I'm not making any promises.”

Tony felt as empty inside as Carmen's apartment. There was practically nothing left of him. This was exactly what he had feared the most about love.

“You're not going to stop me?” Carmen asked quietly.

Tony shrugged. “I'm really not so powerful, you know. I can tell you to go, but I can't make you want to stay.”

N
OW ALL HE COULD
think about was drowning himself in depravity.

Tony picked up Ari Nachman and Dr. Demos, his favorite whoring companions, and they went to Naomi's, drinking whiskey along the way. “I'm going to fuck every woman in the place,” said Tony.

“I'll vote for that,” said Nachman.

When they arrived, however, the waiting room was empty of
girls. There was an American hippie watching television. He had long, stringy blond hair and a red-blond beard, and he wore a New York Yankees hat. He looked at Tony with open-mouthed delight.

“Hey, hombre, I have desire to shaking your hand!” the American said in barely understandable Spanish. He started toward Tony, but Scar rudely stepped between them and shoved the American against the wall. “
Por favor,
simply to say
mucho gusto,
” the American complained.

“No weapons,” Scar reported after frisking him.

“Where are the girls?” asked Tony.

“They to disappear,” said the American. “Here are only one, she is.”

“What's going on?” Nachman asked in English.

“All the GIs have been called back to their bases,” said the American. “In fact, I'm one of the few gringos around. The embassy told me that all nonmilitary personnel were supposed to leave the country. But I don't give a shit about politics, man. I'm on a spiritual journey—drivin' from Fairbanks, Alaska, headed for Tierra del Fuego. I mean, how'm I gonna avoid Panama? War or not.”

Tony smiled thinly and wondered whether to have the American killed. That might pick up his mood.

Presently Naomi appeared. When she recognized Tony her nostrils pinched together involuntarily. “I thought you were supposed to be retiring to Monaco,” she said.

“I would go, but my friends all beg me to stay.”

“Really?” Naomi said flatly.
“These
friends?”

Nachman and Dr. Demos shrank in their chairs.

Six months ago she would not have felt so free to mock me, Tony thought. Now it was all she could do to keep from sneering.

“We came for some relaxation, not for politics,” said Tony wearily.

“You picked a bad night. We've only got one girl tonight and she's with a client.”

“What about you?” said Tony. Naomi was middle-aged and a little formidable, but still. . . .

She looked at him as if he were a fly that had just landed in her food. “I'm retired, like you ought to be. You can go over to Aquarius, but it's the same everywhere. No soldiers, no girls.”

Were they all part of some female conspiracy? Tony was getting desperate.

“Hey, man, you can take my place in line,” said the helpful American. “It'd be a fuckin' privilege.”

Tony acknowledged this gesture with a cold stare. As if he was going to wait in line!

“One girl? Doesn't give much for us to do,” said Dr. Demos. But he didn't say it very loud. Tony's frame of mind was a little frightening, even to his psychiatrist.

Naomi went back into her office, leaving the men to watch a soap opera on TV. Ten minutes later, an obese college student sauntered down the hallway, rubbing his glasses on his filthy shirt. When he put them back on his face, he recognized Tony and his mouth fell open. Then he bolted for the door.

The idea of following such a cretin was so disgusting that Tony nearly got up to leave. But then the girl appeared, and he kept his seat.

She was his type, thin but with nice full breasts like welcome baskets. She obviously knew who he was, but her face registered no reaction. She fluffed her hair and looked around the room and yawned.

“What's your name?” Tony demanded. He could take only so much insouciance in one evening.

“Gloria.”

“Gloria, it's time for you to do something for your country.”

She shrugged and led Tony down the hall.

Because of his pitted complexion, his narrow shoulders, his short stature, and his inclined-to-be-rotund figure, Tony had always felt an extreme sense of physical inadequacy; and yet, with all his shortcomings on display, nothing made him happier than
stripping naked. It was liberating and decisive. Somehow, when he took off his clothes with a woman, especially a woman he didn't know, he also took off his self. Being with a whore was even better in some ways than being with Carmen. With a whore, there was no history and nothing to explain. Whores were so forgiving, so accepting of who he really was. If only God could be so merciful! With Carmen, he longed to dissolve in her arms and merge into a single egoless being; but he could never quite reach her. There was some final membrane between them that he could not penetrate. (If he did, he'd be in heaven!) But with a good whore he always felt he was on the edge of something—an explosion!—blowing himself to kingdom come!

Gloria gave a pitying little smile when Tony was undressed, which he accepted as the inevitable toll on the road to pleasure.

“What do you want?” Gloria asked.

“I wouldn't mind if you hurt me a little bit,” Tony admitted.

“You want to be punished?” She stood up and her breasts moved in a slow rhythm, as if they were constructed of some heavy element. Her waist was tiny, but when she slipped off her pants her ass swelled up admirably. Tony loved it with all his heart. Her ass was a place of mystery and his hope for glory, the very reason he had been born. God was in there, he knew it.

Gloria took a pair of handcuffs from a drawer. Tony compliantly placed his wrists around a bar on the brass bed. The cold metal click signified his surrender. He was helpless now, hers to do with as she wished.

Gloria studied him, like a doctor doing an examination, and with the same aura of authority. She ran a sharp green fingernail down Tony's torso. He quivered in pleasure, verging on pain. “You've been bad,” she said.

“I've been very bad,” he agreed.

“Someone needs a spanking.”

Tony crossed his handcuffed arms and rolled over onto his belly, presenting himself for punishment. He could hear Gloria
rummaging in the drawer again, and then he felt the touch of a leather strap being drawn across his buttocks.

“Whap!”

Oh, my God! It really hurt!

“That's too much!” he cried.

“Don't complain, you little weasel!” She lashed him again, much harder. His whole body levitated. His internal organs huddled together in a defensive knot. “Somebody ought to pay you back for all the harm you've done.”

Tony groaned. “I didn't mean it!”

The lash did its work. Again and again. Then she stopped.

“Don't look,” she said.

She was back in the drawer. In a moment Gloria ordered him to spread his legs. As soon as he did, he felt a lubricated dildo being shoved up his ass, only it was way too long for a dildo! Tony screamed, but she kept pushing, and there was nothing he could do to resist, she was going to shove it all the way through him! This was the end! Impaled in a whorehouse! Explosions rang in his ears. Then the entire room bounced as if the house were going to leap into the sky. What was happening? A mirror blew off the wall and shattered in the air. Gloria screamed. Everything was exquisitely strange and painful.

And then suddenly the door opened and Nachman stood there, looking at Tony handcuffed to the bed with a broomstick up his ass. Nachman was dazed and covered with a dusting of ceiling plaster. “Shit, Tony—it's the Americans! They've invaded!”

W
HERE ARE THE
goddamn keys?” Nachman said after he had removed the broomstick. Gloria had vanished with the first explosion.

“There's a drawer,” said Tony. “Look in there.”

“I can't see a damn thing.” The power was blown. Aircraft were roaring five feet overhead. Bombs going off right and left. “Fucking whore was probably in on the whole thing,” said Nachman. “Wait, this may be the ticket.”

As soon as he unlocked the handcuffs, Tony curled into a fetal ball.

“Get up, Tony. We've got to make a run for it. What's your plan?”

“My plan?”

Another explosion rattled the room. “Yes, your plan! You've got a contingency plan, don't you? The goddamn gringos are blowing the shit out of this country. Where are you supposed to be? Where's your remote command headquarters? Who's the contact with the civil defense squad?”

“There is no plan,” Tony admitted.

“No plan? Tony, you got the fucking United States knocking
down your door, and there's only one thing they want. You.”

But Nachman's words were drowned out by the screeching of jets overhead and the awesome sound of a 105-millimeter howitzer blowing holes in the planet.

Tony started to put on his uniform. He was having a little trouble making his legs work.

“Wait!” said Nachman. “You can't wear that! Everyone will know who you are. You need a disguise.”

Just then Scar came into the room, pushing the longhaired American ahead of him. “He was trying to run off,” said Scar. “I thought maybe he knew something.”

“No sabe nada!
I'm a fuckin' hippie, man!”

“You're an American,” said Nachman. “Your goddamn army is blowing the shit out of this country.”

“Like, I'm highly aware of that, dude. I was just tryin' to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

“First, give the General your clothes.”

The flash of a nearby explosion illuminated Tony in his red silk underwear.

“Okay,” said the American reluctantly as he stripped off his Bermuda shorts, “but what am I gonna wear?”

“Put on the General's uniform.”

“I don't know, man. That could be unwise.”

“I can't find my ribbons,” said Tony.

“We don't have time for that,” said Nachman. “You got to get dressed and out of here—now!”

The men rushed outside, cursing Dr. Demos, who had taken the Mercedes, along with a suitcase of cash that Tony kept in case of emergency. The only car left in the lot was a tiny white Hyundai covered with bumper stickers.
Save the Whales. Visualize World Peace. Onward Through the Fog.

“See if the keys are in your pocket,” said Nachman.

Tony found the keys in the Bermuda shorts just as the American came racing out of the whorehouse, wearing Tony's uniform. “Hey, don't steal the car, dude!”