God's Favorite (37 page)

“It's not stealing,” said Tony. “It's war.”

“But it's still
my car!”

“And it stinks,” said Nachman as he got into the driver's seat, which was draped with a seat cover of wooden beads. “Tony, roll down the window.”

“What about me, Chief?” asked Scar.

“We'll meet at La Playita,” said Nachman.

“No, they'll know about that,” said Tony. “Our friends will help us. Check with Señora Morales—she'll know where we are.”

Nachman spun the Hyundai onto the highway. “I should have guessed that they would wait for the full moon,” he said. The city was in a yellow twilight of fires and tracer bullets. The air churned with half-seen aircraft. Noise fell on them like an avalanche.

“My God—look!” cried Nachman. All around them, paratroopers were landing and pulling in their billowing parachutes, and above them the sky was filled with thousands more. The undersides of the silken chutes glowed from the reflected explosions.

Nachman swerved and jammed the car into reverse. “Tony, pull your hat down!” The paratroopers were close enough for Tony to see the camouflage on their faces. He crammed the Yankees hat down over his eyes.

Nachman drove through the luminous night without his headlights. When they arrived on the airport highway leading out of town, they saw people scattering everywhere, racing for home or looking for cover. Nachman navigated through the disoriented mob. Cars passed indiscriminately on both sides of the highway. Tony had never seen such madness.

“Look—they're fighting back!” Tony cried excitedly. An antiaircraft battery fired into the sky from the barracks at Tinajitas, on a hilltop above the Río Curundú. “The men are still with me!”

Nachman shook his head in soldierly admiration. Tracers flew out of the fort like a fireworks display.

“Do you want to go up there and give the men some courage?” asked Nachman. “They need leadership.”

“As an officer, I agree,” said Tony. “On the other hand, I am also the leader of the country. I think my first duty is to protect myself.”

Above them, the immense black shadow of an aircraft Tony had never seen before suddenly darted into view and then roared low overhead like a passing Death Star. In its wake, the mountain flew into the air in a blinding red-orange flash. Everything was gone—like that! The armory ignited in a secondary explosion. The guts of his defense! Gone!

“Jesus,” Tony muttered.

Nachman drove quietly through the chaos.

Ahead of them was a queer sight—the baseball stadium was filled with people in the stands and on the field. They were staring into the sky, watching the war. Whenever a new explosion shook the fundament, they cheered.

“They think they're at a rock concert,” said Nachman. “It's crazy, completely fucking crazy.”

“They're cheering for the Americans,” Tony said glumly.

“Maybe you better lie down in the backseat.”

F
ATHER
J
ORGE WAS
awakened by what sounded like surf crashing against the walls of Our Lady of Fatima. He sat upright in a panic. A tidal wave? he wondered. But then he heard the sound of the helicopter hovering directly overhead. He threw open the window and looked outside. The backwash from the helicopter blades blew the curtains off his wall.

It was midnight, and the rest of Chorrillo had never gone to bed. The apartments across the street were brightly lit. Father Jorge could see the silhouettes of his neighbors standing on their balconies. They were looking into the sky and waving and shouting, but their words were drowned out by the powerful mechanical drone. Then came an even louder sound, the accented voice
of an American soldier broadcasting in Spanish from an immense amplifier on Ancón Hill. “Soldiers in the Comandancia! You must surrender! We have you surrounded.”

There was no answer until the defiant sound of a machine gun erupted from the Comandancia. The helicopter abruptly swerved out of the line of fire. Instantly three aircraft converged on the Comandancia from different angles, firing rockets into the center of the structure. Father Jorge had never seen anything so sudden and frightening—and exciting. Then the lights of the city abruptly went out.

Father Jorge groped in the dark for his clothes and sandals. By the time he was dressed he could see that dozens of refugees were already headed toward the parish, many of them carrying children. He rushed downstairs to let them in.

Nuns entered the sanctuary in bathrobes and immediately set to work attending to shrieking babies. The orphans from the parish house wandered around in their pajamas, wearing dizzy expressions of amazement. When Father Jorge opened the patio door another river of people flowed inside.

“Why are you coming here?” he asked.

“The gringo soldiers told us to come,” a woman in a flowered housecoat said.

Father Jorge muttered a quick prayer and then stumbled into the kitchen. Two harried nuns were making coffee and tamarind tea by candlelight. “Sisters, have we enough food for these people?” he asked.

“We don't even have enough water, Father,” one of them replied. “The utilities are dead. We have no milk for the children. And we were supposed to go to the market this morning, so the pantry is virtually empty.”

An explosion rattled the walls and sent spices flying off the shelves. Father Jorge heard screaming coming from everywhere in the parish complex—from the orphanage, the dining room, the sanctuary, the basketball court, the home for the elderly—hundreds of voices from every room and corner. He pushed his
way through the frantic hordes. All around, mothers were crying out, seeking their lost children. Elderly people vomited in panic. Fear was transforming itself into illness and passing through the crowd in a sudden contagion.

“Father, come here!” a voice cried. “There are wounded people here!”

The priest pressed his way toward the jammed patio between the orphanage and the sanctuary. Overhead the voice in the helicopter was again calling for surrender. Father Jorge could make out the shapes of hundreds—perhaps thousands—more people massed outside in the street, pushing to get in. The confusion was multiplied many times by the darkness. Near his left ear a match was struck. Terrified faces stared at him, looking for him to tell them what to do. At his feet there was the body of an old man whom Father Jorge knew as a beggar he often encountered outside the Economic Café. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood, which appeared black and full of bubbles.

“The gringos have killed him,” someone said.

“But I'm not dead!” the beggar protested.

“No, no, it was the Digbats who killed him,” another person said. “They're in the streets, everywhere, firing into our apartments. It's crazy! No one is safe out there.”

“I'm not dead!”

“Take him into the dining room,” Father Jorge said. “It will serve as our hospital.”

He started to follow them, but he noticed a little girl with a red bow in her hair.

“Renata, where's your mother?” he asked. Even in the dimness he could see that she was pale and frightened. She looked at him but couldn't respond. “Have you seen her?” he asked.

She shook her head no.

“Do you think she may be looking for you?”

Renata burst into tears and clung to Father Jorge's side.

“Don't worry, little one, I'll find her for you,” he said.

He knew it was wrong to leave the parish when so many depended
on him, but he couldn't do otherwise. He was drawn by a force he couldn't resist and hesitated to name. The streets were filled with a strange yellow light. The sound of small arms and machine-gun fire erupted nearby. He heard glass breaking and footsteps skittering over the cobblestones. A huge flash suddenly turned the world into a yellow afternoon, and then it went dark again—even darker, it seemed. Father Jorge blindly pushed his way through the tide of refugees who were coming to the parish from all directions. Some of them looked at him as if he were mad. “They're killing people, Father! Where are you going?” But he scarcely heard them. He ran through the shadows calling Gloria's name.

He could smell the fire in Mariners Street even before he saw it. There was a bright glow coming from one of the apartments. The fire had gotten onto the balcony and was creeping along the sagging timbers. For a moment, it seemed to rest there, faltering, but suddenly another flame appeared in the upper story of the apartment building next door. There was nothing to stop it now. Chorrillo was made of matchsticks. Glimmering cinders flew into the air—tiny emissaries of destruction.

Voices inside the apartments cried out for help, but Father Jorge could not stop for them. People were dragging their belongings into the street. Two men were absurdly trying to shove a piano through a doorway. The people trapped behind them were screaming in terror and rage. The strangeness was so powerful that he was not even sure which entrance led to Gloria's apartment, but when he stumbled into a doorway, he recognized the broken bicycle in the ruined foyer. He tripped on the missing steps and vaguely registered that he had cut himself somehow. But he could think of nothing else but her.

Her door was open. Glass from the windows lay scattered all over the floor and the wall was pocked with bullet holes. The Christmas tree had been knocked to the floor, its ornaments strewn around the room. He looked in the closet. She was
nowhere. He ran back into the smoke-filled hallway and stumbled downstairs into the blazing street.

She must be looking for Renata at the convent school, down by the bay on Avenida de los Poetas. Father Jorge ran through the dark street where the fire had not yet arrived. There were television sets and odd appliances lying around that people had tried to carry with them but then had jettisoned in the confusion.

Ahead of him the shadows moved. A figure stepped forth, and then a dozen more. The priest could see the darker outlines of their weapons.

“Who are you?” The voice was very young.

Father Jorge wanted to rush on past them, but there was something predatory and taunting in the way they held themselves, like a pack of wolves. He identified himself and slowed down but decided that stopping altogether was dangerous.

They demanded his money. He was surprised to find that he had a few dollars in his pocket, which he tossed onto the street.

“Are you really a priest?” one of them asked. The tone of his voice was insistent, not curious. “Stop, I want to talk to you.”

Father Jorge kept walking.

“Are you a priest?” the boy repeated.

“I said I was.”

“Am I going to hell, Father?”

Father Jorge stopped. He looked at the boy. In the light of the fires and the moon it was difficult to tell how old he was, but he looked no more than fifteen. No facial hair. Still some baby fat in his features. His youth served only to make him more menacing. Father Jorge asked the boy his name.

“You don't need to know my name, Father. Just answer my question.”

“The answer is yes.”

Father Jorge heard them all giggling like children as he hurried away.

The convent school was closed. The windows had been broken
and the school vandalized. Father Jorge thought he heard some noise or movement inside. He pushed the broken casement of a shot-out window and the entire structure collapsed into one of the schoolrooms. He stepped into the room and again called Gloria's name.

Every room appeared to be empty, yet the chapel was still lit with candles. Father Jorge took one of the candelabra and walked through the wrecked hallway. Then he heard something quite distinct and he went into the small gymnasium.

It wasn't easy to see beyond the glow of candlelight, but he made out two figures on the bleachers.

“Gloria?”

“Is that you, Father?” It was Teo's voice.

He was sitting on a bleacher. Gloria was lying against him. She seemed to be staring at him, but when he could see her more clearly he realized that her eyes were fixed and no longer full of questions. Teo was holding her bloody head in his lap, like some perverse
Pietà.
Father Jorge knelt beside her and took her hand, which was already cold as marble.

Teo was stroking her hair and staring into the candlelight in a trance. The Boba Fett doll hung around his neck.

“Who did this?” Father Jorge demanded.

Teo turned his dull eyes toward him, then looked back into the candles. “Does it matter?”

The priest fought an impulse to slap the boy. “How did it happen?” he asked.

“It was just a mistake,” said Teo. Some kind of automatic weapon lay at his side.

“Tell me,” the priest insisted.

“We were doing our business, and she got in the way.”

“You killed her?”

“No, one of the boys. She was running toward us, shouting something. He just shot her. It was a mistake. It was all a big fucking mistake.”

For a moment, Father Jorge hated him. He hated the stupidity, the anger, the craziness of the mob. He hated Teo for being a part of it. Then he realized he was angry at God, not at Teo. It was God who had tempted him with the prospect of an ordinary happy life. Now God had taken that possibility away. He wanted to scream and cry. Instead, he put his hand on Teo's, which were sticky with his mother's blood, and the boy fell sobbing into Father Jorge's embrace.

G
ENERAL
H
ONEYCUTT
entered the command center of the Tunnel to the sound of a great ovation. His officers were cheering and slapping high-fives, along with a contingent of civilians that the general had never seen before.

A huge relief map of Central America dominated the room, with the individual units of American and PDF forces indicated by flags. No one was paying attention to that, however. The real interest was directed to the bank of television monitors on the wall that broadcast the war from low-orbit satellites and high-flying observation aircraft in infrared and with special thermo-sensitive devices. The atmosphere in the room was like that of a sporting event. On one of the monitors there was real-time footage of the wounded soldiers stumbling about in the dark ruins of the Comandancia. The thermal images of the dying men were gradually fading from the screen.