God's Favorite (6 page)

“You flatter me. But if it's of any value, I'll be happy to offer it.”

“Do you recall when Saint Augustine made his break with the Manichaeans? They asked him how the Christian God could favor men who killed, men who had many wives, men who sacrificed living creatures. I myself have often wondered about this paradox.”

“It's an interesting question,” said the Nuncio, “but to be honest, I haven't read the
Confessions
for many years.”

“Don't you suppose they were thinking of King David?”

“The Manichaeans?”

“He murdered women and children, he took hundreds of wives and concubines, he even cursed God, but God still loved him above all others.”

“Yes, I suppose that's what the Bible tells us.”

“Surely there is some catechism they taught you in seminary that covers this matter.”

“I suppose your question is covered under the heading of ‘unmerited grace,' ” said the Nuncio, a little miffed by the General's familiarity. “I don't know if I can adequately explain the Church's stance on this matter here on the tarmac, but if you'd like to call me sometime . . .”

“Yes, very much,” said Tony. “I am quite sure you can enlighten me.”

As Noriega moved on to the Rastafarian, the Nuncio felt strangely let down, as if he had just failed an examination. He also realized that although he had been in Panama for years, he had just seen a human being behind the mask of power. He was intrigued and charmed—but then he remembered who he was dealing with and quickly turned away.

N
OTHING IN
Panama should be constructed of wood, Father Jorge thought as he walked through the streets of Chorrillo. One might as well have built this slum out of cardboard. The rotten buildings slumped against one another like a bunch of packing boxes that had been left out in the rain. They were nearly all one-room apartments built at the turn of the century to house the West Indian laborers who dug the canal and were never intended to last more than a few years. Their foundations had long since buckled under the insatiable appetite of tropical termites. Balconies and windows melted into hallucinatory angles of repose.
Because the entire neighborhood had been condemned decades ago, it was against the law to charge rent. This, of course, had led to a population explosion, which made Chorrillo even more dangerous than ever before. Extended families crowded into single rooms, cooking with hibachis and sleeping in shifts. The streets were crammed with children and aimless young men. Music rained down from the rooftops, the smell of coffee and simmering beans choked the air, and clotheslines crisscrossed the alleyways. Father Jorge jumped aside as a worn-out tire rolled out of the doorway of a mechanic's shop into the street, where it wobbled into a gaggle of children playing stickball. In a moment, the tire had become a part of the game. No one came to retrieve it—it might sit in the middle of the street for a century.

In the heart of Chorrillo was La Modelo, a prison that once aspired to be, as its name suggested, a model reformatory. Such ambitions had long since slunk away, and now the name had a sinister ring to it. La Modelo was little more than a three-story cage, like a human zoo. Arms and legs dangled through the bars of every window. The prisoners stared vacantly into the street, idly smoking marijuana and calling listlessly to the women who tended the graves at the cemetery next door. Father Jorge had been into the foul prison many times to minister to the men inside. Once he had seen a dead man hanging from a basketball goal. The man had been handcuffed to the hoop and beaten to death by the gang members who ran the place. The guards simply left the body as a bleak reminder of the futility of resistance.

Directly across the street from the prison was the Comandancia, the headquarters of the Panama Defense Forces. Inside a low-slung wall there was a military courtyard and the barracks for several hundred soldiers. Many of them came from the same teetering Chorrillo apartments that loomed over the concrete parapet. Those who had gotten into the army, through merit or connections, considered themselves lucky. For the unscrupulous, it was a path to wealth and power. The sentries could stand
on the wall and talk to their neighbors and the admiring boys on the rooftops or, for that matter, the prisoners in La Modelo, who had little more to do than sit in their windows and watch the troops march in review. Strategically, as much as Father Jorge understood such things, the fort was absurdly located, but there was an intimacy about life in Panama that pressed all experiences together.

Father Jorge walked toward a large apartment house that rose out of a field of rubble. On the blank side of one wall there was a giant face of a Marlboro Man in a black cowboy hat, staring down upon the heart of Chorrillo—the prison, the fort, the cemetery, the teeming street—with savage indifference. Behind these apartments there was another street of wooden slums, which seemed, in Father Jorge's opinion, even more degraded than the crumbling shanties he had already passed. It was called Mariners Street. The balconies on Mariners Street were like a long frozen wave, a bit nauseating to focus on. The thought of people actually living in these perilous apartments filled him with outrage. Much of the wood was so rotten that he could push his fingers straight through the walls. Many times he had presided over funerals of people who had died when a floor suddenly gave way, or a balcony collapsed, or a cooking stove caught fire and the entire structure had burned like a scrap of newspaper. If he chose to, Father Jorge could spend every day of his life campaigning for sanitation and medical attention for his parishioners. Chorrillo was a pesthole, everyone knew it. Too many children had died of diseases that were easily curable. And yet all this was a natural result of the corruption and indifference of military rule. The people themselves lived like rats, moving into abandoned quarters and staying until they simply overran the space, or until they were run off by other, more unscrupulous and dangerous competitors, or until disease or accident destroyed them, leaving their squalid living space for new squatters to occupy.

A small girl sat on a stoop painting her toenails lime green.
Father Jorge recognized her from catechism class. She looked up and greeted him happily.

“Is your mother home, Renata?” Father Jorge asked.

“She's upstairs.”

There was no front door. Father Jorge walked into the stairwell, which was crammed with trash. A child came bolting down the stairs, heedless of the missing steps, and skipped past the priest, who picked his way through the dark corridors, his eyes not yet adjusted to the gloom. He could hear music from a transistor radio coming from one of the rooms. He waved at the dark spaces in front of him and made his way toward the noise.

A young woman who Father Jorge took to be Renata's older sister answered the door. She was wearing the same lime green polish on her very long fingernails.

“I'm looking for Señora Sánchez,” he told her.

“I'm Gloria Sánchez, the mother of Renata and Teófilo,” the young woman responded, avoiding the implications of Father Jorge's clumsy statement. Very few women here were actually married. He admired her tact.

“I've brought you some supplies for Renata's studies,” he said, setting a package on the small table beside the stove.

“Do you want some coffee, Father?”

The priest sat at the table and watched the young woman put the pot on the burner. She was some mixture of black and Indian and Chinese—a typical Panamanian racial gumbo. Her bare arms were strong and shapely, and her skin was the color of polished mahogany. She wore her hair in a ponytail, which was one reason Father Jorge had mistaken her for a teenager, but he could see now that she was a grown woman, in her early thirties, he supposed. There was something especially delicate about the line of her jaw and her fine, thin neck. The intersection of these two appealing vectors was highlighted by a pair of tiny gold crucifixes in the lobes of her small ears.

By Chorrillo standards, the Sánchez household was spacious and well appointed. They even had electricity, although how they
managed to get wiring into the apartment was a mystery. A single bulb illuminated the small room. On the floor were three mattresses, which had been carefully rolled up in a noble attempt at housekeeping. A calendar picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe occupied one wall, and a poster of Sylvester Stallone occupied another. A framed certificate from the Mirabella School of Beauty testified that Gloria Sánchez was a recent graduate. Renata's schoolbooks were in a stack on the floor. The radio rested on the windowsill, with its antenna pointing outside for better reception. Beside the table and chairs, there was a futon and a bureau with several photographs on it. Father Jorge was curious to see them closer; he was looking for hints about Señorita Sánchez's life. But then he looked at her green fingernails and smiled to himself.

“Do you know my son, Father? He is the reason I asked you to come.”

The boy was standing silently in the doorway. He looked to be about eleven, although malnutrition often caused the children of Chorrillo to appear many years younger than they actually were. He had his mother's high cheekbones and delicate nose, but he had the eyes of a bitter old man.

“This is Teófilo,” said the mother.

“Are you in school, Teófilo?” Father Jorge asked.

The boy stared at him impassively. His mother answered for him. “He went for five years, but now he never goes. He only wanders the street with the gangs, isn't that right, Teo?” When the boy gave no response, she continued wearily, “If he doesn't get away from them, God only knows where this will end. Already he is fifteen years old. He has intelligence. He doesn't need to become a gangster.”

“Gangster,” the boy repeated, with an embarrassed smirk on his face.

“Don't laugh, it's happening already. The stealing, the lies. You're becoming a criminal.”

“So what? Next year I'll join the army.”

“Even the army requires you to read and do your sums,” said
Gloria. “Do you want to be ignorant all your life? You need a trade. You need to study. On the streets you only become a nobody. Look at those other boys, they're all going to wind up in prison. Just because they have made stupid choices doesn't mean you have to follow them.”

“They're not stupid,” Teo said angrily. “At least they got money to buy nice things.”

Gloria turned to Father Jorge. “That's all he thinks about, money. He doesn't think about the consequences. It doesn't occur to him that maybe someday he might die out there. I have prayed about this, Father. You must take him. I can't control his life. He needs a man to control him.”

Teo cast a quick look at the priest, then contemptuously rolled his eyes and looked away.

“I certainly can't control him, or any of the other children we raise in the parish,” said Father Jorge. “Every child we take in has to agree to certain rules. They have to study and they must attend mass every day. They cannot commit any crimes or they will be expelled immediately. I don't know if Teo is ready to accept our way of life.”

The boy studied the cracks in the ceiling for a moment. “I heard you got a basketball team,” he said casually.

“We've got several sports teams,” Father Jorge said. “We also have a band, if you like music.”

“He sings like an angel,” said Gloria. “But his voice is still changing.”

“We have a choir, of course,” said Father Jorge, “and workshops where you can learn a trade. There are about twenty other boys there now, all ages. If you want to go visit, I can take you there this afternoon. This is a decision you have to make for yourself. Nobody is going to make you do anything.”

“Can I visit Renata?” the boy asked.

“Of course. Anytime you are not in class. And she can visit you. It is a church, not a prison.”

The boy nodded an almost imperceptible assent.

D
ON
'
T THINK
you can intimidate me,” said Nicky Barletta as he sat shivering in Tony's overly air-conditioned office in the Comandancia. “We do have laws in this country. We do have a constitution. I realize that you are the head of the military forces, but I am the president, and that fact must be respected.”

Tony poured himself an eye-opening dollop of Old Parr. It was nine in the morning, well before his usual rising time.

“You are the president, but you serve at the will of General Noriega,” said Roberto, who sat beside Tony's desk, in front of the Panamanian flag.

Nicky started to respond, since he knew very well what the Panamanian constitution said about this, but he chose not to press the point. “In any case, I am here, making every effort to be helpful.”

Nicky had just gotten off the flight from New York, and now he wished he had never left. He was a stiff, owlish-looking creature, with slicked-back hair and thick, squarish bifocals that framed his eyes in a perpetual expression of alarm. A former World Bank bureaucrat, Nicky saw himself as a soldier of economic
enlightenment, imposing the stern teachings of Milton Friedman on the Third World, much as the conquistadors had imposed bloody Christianity on the savages of the past. Now he shifted uncomfortably in his chair and stared at the warmly inscribed photographs of John Wayne and Mother Teresa on Tony's desk and the brass menorah and the golden Buddha on the shelf behind him. He felt as if he were in a religious museum of some sort—or a crypt. The air conditioner shuddered as the condenser kicked in. Moisture was forming on the windows. Overhead the ceiling fan moaned. Nicky's teeth began to chatter.

“We still have a problem, Nicky,” Tony said politely. “We have to take care of this problem.”

“As I said, I am here and ready to help. What is the problem?”

“I said when you were elected that you had three hundred and sixty-five days to turn the economy around. Frankly, we expected more of you.”