Senor Nice (19 page)

‘And was she really that beautiful, Sir Henry?’

‘Incredibly beautiful, Milady. Her eyes and face outshined the sun and the star. Only she, only she defeated me.’

I didn’t see Rosa the next day, but the day after as I was checking out of the Punta Caracol, she appeared.

‘Enjoy the rest of Panama. Where are you going to?’

‘I’m flying to Colón, visiting Portobelo, then going to Panama City. Which is the best hotel to stay in there?’

‘Without a doubt the Miramar Intercontinental, where Mick Jagger stayed. I’ll be there myself in a couple of days. I’ll look you up.’

Maybe I hadn’t blown it.

The short Aeroperlas flight from Bocas del Toro to Colón
began its descent near the northern entrance to the Panama Canal, where the huge Gatún Locks raise southbound ships from the Caribbean waters of the Atlantic. I reminded myself I still had to figure out why locks were needed to join sea level to sea level. We flew over a walled area, the Colón Free Trade Zone, which the United States made into the biggest duty-free zone in the western hemisphere. Ship-fuelling services, maritime training centres, cargo storage and distribution areas and ship-repair yards were surrounded by the offices of international dredging companies, experts in the construction and maintenance of harbours and waterways, and specialists in land reclamation, coastal defence and riverbank protection.

Portobelo was a short bus ride from the airport. Rosa had been correct: there was nothing. There were no places to stay, no bank and no tourist office, although a tattered notice stated that one would be opening soon. The customs house that once had stored priceless plunder was now a museum. It was closed. Rusty cannons still pointed out to sea, but the castle of San Felipe was no more. The Americans had dismantled it to use the stone for construction. Food stands and booths offering boat trips to Drake Island stood among ruined military buildings half-heartedly offering their goods and services. Portobelo is now a sleepy little town that sits amid the decay of empire, slipping into tropical indolence. The bus took me back to Colón airport.

On arrival at Panama City’s airport, I took a taxi to the Hotel Miramar Intercontinental. It was rush hour, so we took a short cut through the park, a small tropical rainforest known as the Lung of Panama. Monkeys and owls gazed at the crawling traffic. Banking, insurance, shipping, offshore businesses and financial services boosted by drug dollars all contribute to Panama City’s atmosphere. Kids sell flowers and food to commuters, sandwich boards offer mortgages and furniture, gorgeous secretaries giggle on every corner, and women in orange jumpsuits gather leaves and other litter.
Lottery tickets, tax-free casinos and cockpits satisfy the inhabitants’ gambling urges, while arms dealers offload as many weapons as they can to anyone who can afford them. Like Hong Kong, Panama City is pivotal in world trade. It keeps its gaze on the outside and pays little attention to its own hinterland. The city’s cluster of skyscrapers, like all money-laundering centres, is a hive of intrigue with its numerous empty apartments let to fictitious occupants for astronomical rents.

At the heart of the Bay of Panama, the Miramar Intercontinental had every leisure facility from Turkish baths to a dance club. Two porters escorted me to my enormous room, one wall of which was a fully equipped office workstation. Pausing only long enough to change and hoping to see some tribute to Henry Morgan’s achievements, I took a taxi a few miles east to Old Panama. There was no statue of him – there isn’t anywhere, yet – but Henry had obviously done a good job: a few scattered ruins of walls and churches, occasionally serving as backdrops for weddings and raves, and a museum was all there was. When Henry retired from the city, the Spanish had salvaged what they could and moved a few miles west to found a well-fortified replacement city.

From Old Panama I took a
diablo rojo
, one of the buses that decorate the streets with their colourful paintwork and pictures of superstars, to Paseo de las Bovedas and walked on the high sea wall built by the Spanish to protect them against the likes of Henry Morgan. Ships’ horns moaned as the vessels waited to use the world’s greatest short cut. Below the wall dungeons had been converted to restaurants and art galleries. I strolled through cobbled alleyways of crumbling colonial churches and along red-bricked streets. Paint peeled off multicoloured rotting walls. I came across the Parque Bolívar, where Simón Bolívar first urged the union of the former Spanish colonites. Panama declared independence in 1821 and immediately decided to join the loose confederation of
nations led by Bolívar, who had envisaged it as the centre of this peaceful progressive union. He had succeeded in freeing Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela from Spanish rule and said of Panama, ‘If the world had to choose a capital, the Isthmus of Panama would be the obvious place for that high destiny.’ His dreams came to nothing, and Panama declined into a neglected province of Colombia. The old city still had the filth and elegance of seventeenth-century Spain but now also vibrated to the sounds of restoration. Hammers and saws echoed from inside gutted buildings with facades like film sets. A brass band in white uniforms and gloves played Strauss waltzers.

Although dusk was falling, the Museo del Interoceanico was still open. I walked in and learned everything about the Panama Canal.

World commerce, travel and naval warfare have always focused on the only two isthmuses which both link continents and separate oceans – Suez and Panama. King Carlos V of Spain in 1534 saw the sense of digging through Panama to transport the gold of Peru to Spain directly by sea but settled instead for a network of cobbled mule trails. Centuries later, gold was again the catalyst: a carpenter from New Jersey saw something shiny in Coloma, California and the rush was on. A trans-Panamanian railroad was shrewdly opened, and the miners now had three routes from the populated East Coast of the United States to the empty new El Dorado of California: ‘the Plains across, the Horn around, or the Isthmus over’. Those who wished to avoid shipwreck, seasickness or donating their scalps to the Apaches chose the isthmus. Thousands stopped at Panama for a new suit, good fare, lodgings, whimsical shopping needs and a few nights of debauchery. Indian merchants, Chinese laundries, brothels and bars made Panama rich, cosmopolitan, decadent and cool. A canal could only make it better.

During the nineteenth century French technical schools
were the finest in the world. Ferdinand de Lesseps had just built the Suez Canal and with Alexandre Eiffel as part of his team had little problem raising the readies for a Panama venture. The French peacefully took over Panama – whose Colombian masters had ruined its trade and involved it in endless civil wars – and built hospitals, offices, dock facilities, living quarters and machine shops. Panama thrived, but in their enthusiasm the French had overlooked a crucial point: digging through mountainous rock formations clad with dense jungle and enmeshed in massive sinuous muddy rivers was a lot harder than channelling through the flat sandy beaches of the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Storms that turned air into instant liquid, smothering humidity, forbidding jungle twilight, flash floods and freak earthquakes didn’t help. Equipment instantly rusted and clothes were permanently wet. The ditch was a bitch, an expensive one.

Panama boasted the world’s most deadly vermin, insects and reptiles, as well as vampire bats, pumas and jaguars. Tropical diseases included dysentery, dengue fever, yellow fever, cholera and smallpox. It was here that French biologists discovered mosquitoes were the cause of malaria, rather than bad air as its name (
mal aria
) suggests. So many nameless labourers died that a trade developed, shipping cadavers pickled in large barrels to hospitals and medical schools all over the world. Eventually, the French ran out of money and gave up.

Meanwhile, the United States began to take up the white man’s burden from the British. The USA colonised the Philippines, absorbed Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam, and appropriated a naval base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. A canal through the isthmus would facilitate American supremacy at sea, so the United States encouraged Panama’s bid for independence from Colombia with money, guns and the odd warship. Panama gained its autonomy and some badly needed loot, and the US got the sovereignty of the Canal Zone, a ten-mile-wide
strip of land running through the middle of the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, plus the right to intervene in Panama should the situation threaten canal movements. The United States bought the concessions and equipment the French had abandoned but did not continue where the French had left off. Instead, the Americans dammed the Rio Chagres, creating the world’s biggest artificial lake eighty-five feet above sea level, and built a series of locks from the lake to the two oceans. Now I knew why the Panama Canal had locks. Taking ten years and with the world’s biggest locks, gates and concrete structures, at the time it was the largest, most costly single peacetime project mounted anywhere on earth – the biggest experiment ever done with nature. Running from north-west to south-east, the canal is fifty miles long and reduces trade routes by up to 8,000 miles.

The Museo del Interoceanico closed, and I went back to the Miramar to indulge myself in several-star luxury for twenty-four hours, by which time Rosa should have got in touch.

The phone eventually rang. ‘Howard, it’s Rosa. Have you been to the Union Club of Panama?’

I had heard of the Union, one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. For many years Panamanian politics had remained a mere competition among members of the club.

‘Let’s meet there tonight at eleven o’clock. Just mention my name, Rosa Guerrero, at the door.’

I changed into the smartest clothes I had. It was a long walk to the Union Club of Panama, but I felt in the mood. Before leaving, I telephoned Leroy in London. His sister answered and said he had left some hours ago for Gatwick and Jamaica. I left her my Panama number.

I left the hotel’s private marina and headed away from the shore into the city. Shop windows displayed electronics, designer fashions and jewellery at prices cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Aromas of all sorts of cuisines diluted the night smells of luscious flowers and ship oil. Bars became
bawdier, and three-hour hotels draped in bougainvillea promised to satisfy any sexual urge. The street bent back towards the waterfront, and I could see the outline of the Union Club.

‘I’m a guest of Rosa Guerrero,’ I said to one of an army of broad shoulders in chauffeurs’ suits and identity tags. He led me through a mirrored-ceiling lobby of stockbrokers calling their mistresses on mobiles and up a green-carpeted slipway to a balcony drenched in smoke, costly scent and beat music. Directed towards a teak throne next to a table of sparkling glasses and scrolled silver cutlery, I took a seat. A white-gloved waiter brought an ice bucket containing a bottle of Bollinger, which I quickly emptied; the night sea air had made me thirsty. I listened to the conversation at the next table. Some women were ridiculing receding male hairlines and support stockings. The men were discussing the rule of the white arses. Resentment of United States control is still the dominant theme of Panamanian politics and national identity. The waiter brought another bottle of champagne and a sealed white envelope. It was not the bill but a fax from Rosa: ‘I’m so sorry, Howard, but I just can’t make it tonight. Enjoy the Union Club. The tab’s on me. I know we will meet again. I’ve written down my email and other details. Living Stone says hello. You can get in touch with him through me. He says, “Don’t sell Panama down the canal.” Bye. Rosa.’

I was too drunk to feel disappointed. I left the Union Club, accepting the management’s offer of a limousine back to the Miramar. The telephone rang as soon as I fell asleep. It was Leroy.

‘Mi dyah now, mon. Get yo arse over hyah. Now yo a go see di real Jamaica.’

I noticed we were driving away from Kingston. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Mi a go where yo always want fi go, mon, Port Royal. Wait until yo see di name a di hotel.’

Leroy suddenly stopped the car, got out, looked at the last of the swiftly setting red sun, walked a few yards, called someone on his mobile and walked back.

‘Mi bredren Prescot a di hotel manager. Im soon come pick yo up and take care a yo. Mi afi go ina Kingston now an mi see yo tomorrow, mon.’

Leroy took my case out and left me, surprised and confused, on the empty road. I supposed he must have had his reasons. I had learned on my last visit that ‘Soon come’ is Jamaica’s equivalent of
mañana
. Arriving early might suggest mental instability or a deliberate attempt to antagonise, while turning up on time might suggest an overzealous and indecent ploy to flummox, unless it’s for a cricket match. Ten minutes late is anally punctual, while fifteen minutes late displays rare efficiency. Jamaicans have to be at least one hour late before they feel the need to excuse or explain. Prepared for a considerable wait, I decided to wheel my case towards Port
Royal. The road appeared to be on a dyke, the open Caribbean Sea on my left and Kingston Harbour, the world’s seventh largest, on my right. Around the first bend, a lonely stone monument commemorated Jamaica’s first coconut tree. I was wondering whether the tree had grown from a coconut washed ashore or had been deliberately planted when a black Isuzu travelling in the opposite direction slowed down, screeched through a U-turn and pulled up alongside.

‘Niceman?’

‘You Leroy’s friend?’

‘Ah huh. I’m Prescot. I work for the hotel. Please get in, Niceman.’

Prescot was wearing dark brown plastic-framed spectacles, black polyester trousers, polished brogues, a white shirt with a pocketful of different-coloured ballpoint pens and highlighters, and a yacht club tie. He spoke precise and perfect American English. After a few hundred yards, he turned right into a driveway.

‘Are we here, Prescot?’

‘Indeed we are, Niceman. You are welcome.’

‘Why didn’t Leroy bring me all the way here? It’s so close to where he dropped me.’