Beneath a Panamanian Moon (20 page)

Ren drove to the end of the block to turn around. Ren wasn't the best driver, even when straight, so it took a while. I watched from the end of the block as Ren went up on the curb and ran into the chain-link fence. He put the car in reverse, grinding gears and twisting the steering wheel left and right. He had his head hung out the window like a big dog, trying to see around the back end of the Chevy.

“What's he doing?”

“Turning around.”

The car came closer. Ren drove between the nose of the truck and the other loading docks. The Chevy rolled slowly toward me. The two men who had been watching had disappeared and the street was empty. Ren was driving carefully, afraid to tip the chair or run into anything expensive.

When Ren was about twenty yards away, I could feel something bad creep up my throat. For the second time that day, time slowed to a crawl. The heat waves in their shimmer. The rolling litter in a gust of hot wind. Ren's face, split by a stoner's smile. And when the car exploded, I watched the yellow ball of flame erupt and blow out all of the windows. I don't remember being tossed to the ground. I do remember Phil beside me, helping me up. The car exploded a second time and hot twisted chunks of '56 Chevy, big and little, rattled against the warehouse walls like shrapnel. Phil fell on top of me, shielding me with his body.

The men in the warehouse came out and shouted at us over the roar of the fire. Phil jerked me to my feet. I looked at the blazing heap of blackened metal, flames roaring around the frame, black smoke rising quickly into the sky. The doors had been blown open and slammed backward on their hinges. The trunk lid was torn completely off and it lay in the street, a curved sheet of smoking steel. The other thing was something I didn't really want to see, but I did. I saw Ren. He was a torch, a black silhouette inside yellow flames, perched upright on a kitchen chair. His teeth were white.

“C'mon, man, we got to get you out of here.” Phil was pulling me between two abandoned buildings. I was still dazed, unable to make one thought connect to another. I saw the man with the rifle take aim.

I tried to shout but I couldn't make a sound come out of my throat. The man fired and the bullet tore a chunk of concrete out of the warehouse foundation. Phil pulled me again and together we ran, me stumbling, my ribs as sharp as razors.

I don't know how far we ran. I just kept my eyes on his back and ran like I did in the jungle. I stumbled across vacant lots and railroad tracks, past boarded-up buildings, down deserted streets, and up foul-smelling alleyways.

When we reached a busy street we stopped running and walked a few feet to the edge of a small park filled with children playing soccer on a concrete field. There were benches under scruffy trees. We sat down, and I tried to catch my breath. Phil was breathing deeply, but easily. I had my elbows on my knees, afraid I was going to throw up.

“Look what I found,” Phil said. He held out his fist and turned it over, like a magician about to reveal a little sleight of hand. When Phil opened his palm, a spark of sunlight flashed off a silver disc.

It was a dime. A Roosevelt dime. Nothing unusual. Just a dime.

I went down on all fours and tossed my guts in the street like a dog.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When I couldn't be sick anymore, I sat down again and we watched the kids kick the soccer ball from one end of the park to the other.

“You ready to go?”

I said I was.

Phil hailed a taxi at the curb and we climbed inside. There were Christmas lights around the windshield and an illuminated picture of the Virgin Mary on the dash.

“Hey, you guys want to see exhibition?” the cab driver asked, his eyes on us in the rearview.

“No. You know a place called the Chinaman's Drugstore?”

“Sí, señor. But first we go to exhibition, eh?”

“No. The Chinaman's Drugstore. No exhibition,” Phil said.

“Okay, but you miss good show.” The cab pulled quickly into traffic, forcing a bus to swerve into the oncoming lane.

“What's he talking about?”

“It's a sex show,” Phil said. “Juanita and her trained Chihuahua.”

“Every night is opening night.” The driver grinned.

Phil looked out the window. Anger rolled off him like stream.

“Big time,” said the driver. “New show. Get to see donkey fuck gringo.”

Phil smacked the back of the seat. “Hey, asshole. You want to see a gringo fuck a cab driver?”

“Okay, okay,” the driver said. “Some pipple,” he muttered, “got a'solutely no 'preciation of de finer tings.”

We rode for a few blocks, Phil building up to say whatever it was he was going to say. After about the fourth block he said, “What the fuck were you doing back there? You think this is a fucking game?”

I said, “I was helping Ren. He was trying to get home.”

Phil softened a little. “Yeah, well,” he said, “do me a favor. Don't ever help me, okay?”

The city passed by with children at play in the gathering dusk, shopkeepers standing in their doorways, and men watching women watching men. Life hadn't slowed down, even a little. Ren was dead, and soon the black smoke that flattened out over the sunset would be gone, too, blown away by the night wind, and the spinning of the globe, and tomorrow we would be a full day closer to a time when no one remembered Ren, and no one mourned his passing.

“How did you know we were there?”

Phil was thinking about something else, and he ignored me. “We need to see a friend of mine,” he said.

The cab dropped us in front of the corner wine store just as the lights came on, illuminating the white-tiled walls and stuffed, dusty fish. The Asian man stood behind the counter, drying his hands on a wine-stained apron.

Phil said, “This is the Chinaman's Drugstore.”

“This is where Zorro picked me up,” I said. Four days before, but it seemed like a lifetime.

“You need wine,” Phil said, “this is the place. I'll even teach you some Spanish. ‘Abrio y frio.' That's ‘open' and ‘cold.' And you ever need me and don't know where I am, you come here and ask for Choppo.”

“Who's Choppo?”

“He's coming to pick us up, then I want you to take the car I borrowed back to La Boca.”

“No,” I said.

“Harp.” Phil sighed. “It's time for you to go home. And I mean the States home.”

“Not until I know what's going on here. They can't do that to Ren and expect me to back off.”

“They didn't expect you to back off. They expected you to be in the back seat of that Chevy,” Phil said. “I'm the one who wants you to back off.”

“I'm not leaving until I know what's going on.”

Phil ran his open hand over his face. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the hot afternoon air. “You ever been to Disneyland?”

“No. I don't like amusement parks.”

“What kind of person doesn't like Disneyland?” he said. “What are you, a fucking communist?”

“Okay, so what am I missing?”

“Besides a sense of humor?”

I slouched in the corner, arms crossed over my chest. “Fuck you, Phil.”

“One summer in high school, I went so often I got to fuck Minnie Mouse. True. It was like a perk, like a special ride for special guests.”

I pictured Minnie with her little red skirt pulled up to her ears.

“I loved that big head, man, you could swing from those ears all fucking day. But what I really wanted was a crack at Snow White.”

“Why Snow White?”

Phil looked at me and said, “Living with those dwarves, you know she's got pussy that ain't never been touched.”

He made me laugh, he did, and then the picture of Ren sitting behind the wheel of his car jumped into my head.

Phil put his hand on my shoulder. “It's done. It don't mean shit.”

A 1959 red Cadillac convertible, top down, fins up, pulled to the curb and Phil opened the door. I got into the back seat and Phil sat up front.

The man behind the wheel was easily in his sixties, maybe older, his face lined by a lifetime in the sun. His hair was as black and shiny as the leather seats and his white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a small gold crucifix at his throat.

“¿Choppo, qué pasa?”

“It's been a long time, my friend. I thought you were dead.”

“I was. But I came back just to sleep with your woman.”

“Lauren will eat you alive. It takes a macho hombre to ride her. Not a Chicano pendejo with a pinga like dis.” The man laughed and waggled his little finger.

“I need a favor, Choppo.”

“Last time I did you a favor I pissed blood for a week.”

“You ever figure out which one of those quecos hit you with a bat?”

“No,” he said with a philosophical wave of his hand. “So I had to kill them both. Who's your friend?”

“A piano player.”

“Bueno. The world can always use more music.” Choppo turned on the radio and a Panamanian folk song boomed from the Cadillac's speakers. As close as I could figure out the lyrics, the song was about a fisherman who shot his wife. That's what passes for a love song in Panama.

In minutes the Cadillac had cruised out of the crowded streets and into the wide, tree-lined boulevards of the old-money neighborhoods. A lot of new wealth, from drugs and international banking, poured into Panama every year and some of it washed up here, on the old estates. And like aging divas, their baroque charms were in need of constant cash and attention. Through the gates of the high walls I glimpsed armies of Panamanian men scurrying across the yards, wrapping up a day of attending to mansions that were as old and corrupt as the country itself.

Choppo stopped the Cadillac and we waited while an armed man nodded and let us pass. Once through the gates we circled a stone fountain and parked in front of the house. Inside, stairways curved around the foyer and up to the second floor. Double doors in the center opened onto a large living room with windows that looked out across the water. Boats, their running lights sparks against the gray, decorated the bay.

Phil and Choppo talked old times and I wandered the room taking in the artwork. Tiny pre-Colombian men with enormous erections were carefully displayed in a long glass case. Above the case was a painting of J.F.K., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elvis. The three men looked off toward some brighter, less-dead future just out of frame.

The furniture—leather, chrome, and glass—was gathered around a massive ebony table and every seat had a view of the bay and the emptiness beyond.

I wandered over to look at a framed photograph on the far wall. A very young Choppo stood smiling for the camera with another man. Both men were dressed in army fatigues and both were smoking hand-rolled cigars.

Choppo came up behind me. “You recognize him?”

“It looks like Fidel.”

“It is Fidel. He and I were good friends once, before he got involved in politics. Politics will ruin a man faster than a cheating woman.”

“I might not have recognized him without the cigar.”

“That is not a cigar, amigo.”

“Oh.”

“It gets boring in the jungle. A little smoke makes it easier to change history, no?”

A young woman came in with a tray. She set the tray on the table and handed each of us a drink before perching herself on the edge of an Eames chair.

Choppo took a seat in the center of the sofa, on stage, and said, “Ah, it is very nice to have you both in my home. Now, what can I do for you, Felipe?”

Phil said, “A friend of ours was blown up today.”

Choppo shrugged. “Ah. I see. But grief is an excellent reason to drink. Please.”

Phil and I both sipped our drinks. It was straight vodka, as cold as the Arctic, and it went down like ice water.

Choppo drank his off in one swallow and settled back on the couch, his arms spread out over the back, a big smile across his face. Even death didn't seem to dent Choppo's good humor.
“Dígame,”
he said.

“I followed a truck from La Boca to the warehouse district,” Phil said.

“And what was in the truck, my friend?”

“Weapons. Plastic explosives.”

“A nasty cargo.”

“I also found bags of
nieve blanca
.”

“It could have been rice flour, as it was with my friend Manuel.”

“You know it wasn't.”

“Perhaps if you give me the exact location of this warehouse, I could tell you more.”

Phil gave him the address. Choppo got up from the sofa and said, “Let me make a phone call, I'll see what I can find out.”

When Choppo had gone, the woman opened the patio doors and let the night breeze fill the room. She also let the breeze billow her skirt, and blow through her hair; she was an actress on a very small stage letting us enjoy the silent performance. When it was over, she said to me, “See me before you leave,” and walked onto the patio.

I whispered to Phil, “What did you just do?”

“I traded a warehouse full of cocaine for help with the locals. Why? You got something better?”

Choppo returned to the living room and sat down. “I found out some very interesting things. First, the Guardia Nacional is looking for both of you. I told them you were with me and I assured them you had nothing to do with the explosion. They believed me. They know me as a man of integrity in a country where integrity is a rare commodity.”

“What about the cocaine?”

Choppo tilted his head and shrugged wearily. “Your innocence has its price.”

“And the warehouse will be empty before morning,” I said.

“One way or the other.” He was too weary to smile, yes, but he could still be amused. “Influence also has its price,” he said, “even in Washington.”

“Yes, it does,” I said.

“It's best not to go through life with your head in the clouds, young man. In Panama, you could trip and fall.”