As they entered the examining room, an orderly wheeled in a gurney bearing the waxy corpse of Serafín Mitrotti. “We tried to clean him up a little before you came,” Dr. Crespo apologized. “He was rather messy. As you see, he’s been dead for several days.”
The Nuncio tried not to breathe. He felt deeply embarrassed for Mitrotti to be seen in this appalling condition. Only a month before, he had seen him at the Union Club during his lunch with Roberto. The stinking corpse on the gurney was barely recognizable. His face was horribly battered. There were deep cuts on his forehead and arms.
“When did you receive him?” the Nuncio asked.
“He came yesterday from Penonomé. That is where the autopsy was performed.”
“And they ruled it a suicide?”
Dr. Crespo grinned wryly. “May I ask what is your interest in this, Monseñor?”
“The family wishes to have a Christian burial, but the Church cannot sanction such a ceremony in the case of a self-murder. So I have been asked to examine the body and give an opinion.”
“I am an atheist myself, so these matters are immaterial to me. And I cannot believe this poor fellow has any further concerns.”
“In this case, Doctor, I believe there is a political dimension as well.”
Dr. Crespo shrugged. “Politics is another area that I try to avoid. In my business, you so often see the consequences.”
The Nuncio did not doubt that statement. “I take it you knew Serafín.”
“Everyone knew him. He was very brave, but perhaps a little foolish. One saw his name in the paper too often.”
“So it would seem. Could any man have done this to himself?”
“If you are asking me for a professional opinion, then I will tell you that the cause of his death has already been officially established. He bled to death from self-inflicted wounds.”
Obviously, Dr. Crespo did not want to be drawn into this affair, and yet the Nuncio felt inadequate to the task of overruling a medical decision. “Let us simply discuss the matter theoretically,” he said.
“Theoretically?”
“As you know, we priests often deal with matters that are mysterious or even irrational. I suppose such things happen in your business as well.”
“Sometimes,” Dr. Crespo said cautiously.
“On those occasions, there may be some details that defy rational explanations. Such as why a man who intends to commit suicide would break his own nose.”
“Yes,” Dr. Crespo agreed. “It is a mystery.”
“Also, these cuts around his head, wouldn’t they have bled copiously? Would he then have been able to hurt himself in more profound ways? I would think he would have been in shock.”
“Yes, it is especially peculiar given that no blood was actually discovered in the motel room where he was found.”
“That is exceedingly strange.”
“I would say it is practically a miracle,” Dr. Crespo said with a strangely blank expression.
“I’ve always been interested in miracles, but I’ve never actually found one,” said the Nuncio.
“Well, then, you may be curious about this as well.” Dr. Crespo held up one of Mitrotti’s mutilated arms. “This man cut his hands nearly off. Look, you can see the bones.”
The Nuncio forced himself to examine the deep gashes in Mitrotti’s wrists, which had severed the tendons as well as the arteries. “One would think it would be impossible to cut one’s wrist so badly, and then have the strength remaining to cut the other one.”
“Another miracle,” said Dr. Crespo.
WHEN HE FINISHED lunch at the Economic Café, Father Jorge walked down the Avenida de los Poetas, which ran along an inlet of the bay. A dozen empty fishermen’s boats bobbed at anchor, their gunwales lined with droopy pelicans. He was thinking about Renata Sánchez’s First Communion, which was soon approaching, and the opportunity to see Gloria again. He wondered at the nature of his interest in her. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Her eyes were so vivid and receptive, her voice was so soft and playful, her touch was so electric. Her smell hovered over him like a confusing cloud.
The traffic on Avenida Central came bursting through the signal lights like greyhounds at the racetrack. Father Jorge abruptly snapped into awareness and stepped back on the curb just as a pickup truck with oversized tires roared past. One saw these vehicles everywhere in Panama, these big pickups and four-wheel-drive sport utility trucks. People got tax benefits because they were described as agricultural vehicles, and yet they all seemed to be driven by middle-class teenage boys playing the radio at seismic levels.
Litter from yesterday’s antigovernment demonstration still filled the streets—confetti, torn posters—and some of the office buildings were still draped with signs of support made from computer printouts. This budding revolution had an odd holiday feel about it. In the distance, Father Jorge could hear the sounds of a crowd and the screech of a microphone. He supposed it must be another demonstration.
Out of curiosity, he walked toward the noise, which emanated from Terraplén. The streets were too narrow for two-way traffic, and they were made even more constricted by the many kiosks selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. He could smell the harbor and the fish market and the stale beer that wafted through the doorways of the bars, which were busy even at noon. A man slept in a garbage can. Dark young boys ran toward him begging him to buy pralines or homemade sugar cookies. There was one child trying to sell empty lard buckets. He could tell by their accents that they were Cuban. Thousands of Cuban families lived here. They had purchased falsified Panamanian passports in misplaced hopes of getting to America. Instead, they were stuck in Panama, unable to get legal employment, their children not allowed to go to school. They had become a new underclass in a country already teeming with paupers.
He realized that the amplified voice he was hearing belonged to General Noriega. He couldn’t make out the words yet, but that squeaky, awkward sound was too distinctive to belong to anyone else. Soon the priest found himself at the back of a crowd of several thousand people who were watching the General speak. He stood on a makeshift platform on the seawall, directly in front of a statue of Balboa, wearing a turquoise guayabera and a straw hat, his Santería beads clearly visible around his neck. He looked like any ordinary Panamanian man.
“I am home,” the General was saying. “I am back in the streets of my youth. People say to me, ‘General, why have you avoided returning to Terraplén?’ I tell them that I have always been here, I have never left these streets. They are my real mother. Like many children, I ran free and wild here—perhaps too wild for my own good.” The General laughed as several of the mothers in the carpet of faces before him shook their heads in agreement. “Hey, Grandma, you remember that, don’t you?” he called to an elderly woman standing on a balcony, who giggled and then put her hand over her mouth to hide her missing teeth. “Yes, the people of Terraplén know Tony Noriega,” the General continued. “And so when I come to apologize to the people of Panama, it is here in my home that I must begin. That’s right, I am here to beg your forgiveness—for letting you down! For allowing the white asses who own this country to continue to control your lives! You see what they have done to our beloved Panama—and to us! We have the highest per capita debt in the world—and for what? Do you see any money for improvements? Terraplén is the same as it was when I was a boy. Many years have passed, many promises have been made, but what has come of it? Nothing! They were lies! One president after another has come forward with a suitcase full of empty promises, and when he leaves office his suitcase is always full of money! You know this to be true. The white asses think that we owe them this!”
Father Jorge surveyed the faces of the crowd. As usual, most of them were civil-service workers who were paid to attend, but there were also people looking out their windows, and on the margins of the crowd stood hundreds of unschooled teenagers and unemployed young men. It was to them that General Noriega was speaking. He rep
eatedly looked and gestured in their direction. Father Jorge couldn’t quite understand what he was witnessing. In his memory, General Noriega had only rarely made political speeches; he much preferred to be a silent presence rather than a public figure. The gist of the speech was very disturbing, but also puzzling, since everyone knew that it was General Noriega who placed the corrupt presidents in office—and removed them at his leisure.
“They own our land, but they don’t own our souls!” Noriega cried, and the audience shouted out in affirmation. During the speech, young men in colorful T-shirts that said Dignity Battalion roamed through the audience, passing out fliers. Father Jorge accepted one of the crude recruiting brochures. There was a drawing of a muscular teenager carrying an automatic weapon. “I say to the white asses, ‘The people are going forward now—get out of our way! We are fed up with your lies! Tony Noriega is standing here in the streets of Terraplén saying it is time to take what we deserve!’ ” The famished young men on the margins of the crowd began to press closer. The General paused for a moment. “Now when the white asses hear this, they will want to get rid of Tony Noriega. But you won’t let this happen, will you? You can tell them, ‘If anything happens to General Noriega, the Dignity Battalion will come to your homes! We will drag your wife into the street! We will eat the food in your kitchen! We will shit in your fine commode! Your house will be our house! So don’t go fucking with Tony Noriega, because the people of the streets will not let this happen!’ Am I right?”
Father Jorge turned and walked hurriedly through the battered neighborhood, leaving the cheering crowd behind. As he passed unclaimed trash in the squalid street, sewer water gushing out of cracks in the ground, abandoned burned-out hulks of cars, idle women on the corners, harelipped children begging for coins, his anger boiled over and he raged to himself about the hypocrisy, the injustice, the waste, the soul-crushing despair of Panama’s lost people. What did Noriega offer them? Not hope but revenge.
The soldier’s confession was still weighing on his mind. Father Jorge was thinking how good people can be made bad merely by consenting to the evil around them. There is always evil in the world, only sometimes it is so much in control that there seems to be no possibility for good to flourish or even survive. Then he thought about Gloria Sánchez, a good woman, he believed, but with no obvious escape from the driving poverty of her environment. Perhaps prostitution was a kind of moral sacrifice she made to support her children. He would like to think of it that way and to forgive her for it. And yet one can’t just give in to the evil of the system. One has to confront it, to resist it. But how? What good was a priest when the only counsel he could offer to such people was to pray to God to make impossible alternatives obvious to them? Perhaps, he thought ruefully, I am no more than a freelance meddler in the affairs of others. I have nothing to give them but prayers and false hopes.
In this state of mind, he looked up and saw that he had already arrived at the nunciature and Sister Sarita was waving to him and telling him to go immediately to the library.
THE NUNCIO WAS drafting his weekly report to the head of the Vatican Secretariat of State. Although it was a routine task, there was much to say, even if, as the Nuncio hoped and expected, such reports went unread. He supposed that Cardinal Falthauser merely glanced at the monthly budget that he was required to append. And yet, out of his compulsive sense of duty and a certain secret vanity concerning his talents as a correspondent, the Nuncio faithfully fulfilled his obligation to keep the Vatican current on Panamanian events:
“Although GENERAL NORIEGA remains very much in charge of this country, the middle class has begun to turn against him. The press has been quite outspoken about the farcical investigation of the SPADAFORA assassination and openly speculates about the likely involvement of government agents. Everyone here believes that the General ordered the killing. The tragedy has been extended by the shocking death of Spadafora’s father, CARMELO SPADAFORA, at a rally in Chiriquí last week. He was about to speak when he suddenly fell out of his chair and died onstage, the victim of a heart attack. He had been in fragile health for many years, but the stress of events, and the weight of his grief, overwhelmed him in the end. There seems to be no end to this national calamity.
“Demonstrations against the government, practically unknown in the past few years, have become a common occurrence despite the lack of leadership and the frequent beating of the protesters by PDF troops. The General has responded by threatening the bourgeoisie with class warfare. Cuban arms have been ferried into the country secretly and hidden in caches to be used in the unlikely case of an American invasion or in the event of political insurrection by the middle class.
“NORIEGA’s more immediate problem concerns his relationship with PABLO ESCOBAR, the ruthless drug chieftain of the Medellín cocaine cartel. The cartel paid the General a substantial sum of money to avoid extradition and to set up a giant cocaine processing plant in Darién Province, on the Colombian border. The Americans found out about it and shut it down. Since then, Escobar has threatened to have the General murdered. It is believed that FIDEL CASTRO is negotiating between the parties, but the matter remains unresolved and highly unstable. As long as the General is threatened by drug lords, he will be unwilling to negotiate his own departure from power; it would be like signing his death warrant.
“The situation is made even more volatile by an ongoing American investigation into Panamanian corruption. This seems wildly hypocritical, given the several dummy corporations established here by the Central Intelligence Agency to launder drug money from the Contras. One of Noriega’s pilots, FLOYD CARLTON, a well-known narcotrafficker, was arrested recently in Costa Rica and flown to the U.S., where it is presumed he will offer evidence to the American Congress about NORIEGA’s involvement in the Central American drug trade. Others who might have provided additional testimony have disappeared or been found dead. The brutality of these people is difficult to overstate.
“If you will permit a personal aside, once again I would like to request reassignment to a European country . . .”
The Nuncio always added a petulant note at the end of his missives, just in case anyone happened to read them. He had learned that the best way of keeping his enemies at bay was to allow them to believe in his continued misery. He was just finishing this complaint when he heard Father Jorge’s knock.
“Am I in time?” the young man asked as he came into the library. His face was still flushed from his vigorous walk.
“Don’t worry. Roberto called not two hours ago. He said the interview will not air until six. We’ve got a few moments yet.”
Everyone in Panama was talking about Roberto’s sudden revelations. He had given an interview to La Prensa that afternoon, in which he accused Noriega of Spadafora’s murder. The whole country was waiting to see what else he had to say on television that evening.
“Did he ask you to come to his house?” Father Jorge asked. Roberto had surrounded himself with prominent people, especially churchmen, in an attempt to protect himself from Noriega’s wrath.
“I declined,” the Nuncio admitted. “The last thing the Vatican wants is to have its emissary caught up in the middle of a civil war. That is why all our contacts with the opposition must be kept in strict confidence. Something like this, with press and television—” He shrugged and drew down the corners of his mouth, staring heavenward—a Gallic gesture of complete hopelessness.
Promptly at six Roberto came on the screen, looking weirdly exuberant in his white robes as a nervous interviewer asked questions that had never been publicly posed in Panama. “First, let me confess my own sins,” Roberto said. He pointed to his palatial living room, with its Louis XV furniture and Rubenesque frescoes on the walls. “Look at my beautiful home. It’s at least half-stolen. I say that because much of my own fortune has come from selling Panamanian passports to poor Cubans. And this is just my share! Everybody on the general staff made fortunes. It was expected! It was the nature of things! But I c
an’t take my millions to heaven. I ought to be in jail, I know that. Only I do not wish to go there alone. Noriega should go with me. And many, many others.”
The Nuncio and Father Jorge exchanged an amazed look.
“Why are you telling about this now?” the interviewer asked in a shocked whisper.
“Because I am a little crazy, and you know what they say about crazy people—they always tell the truth.”
Roberto then began to ramble about “mystical guerrilla warfare.” He showed a plaque, which he propped up against his feet, that contained the symbols of all the world’s great religions—it was a spiritual shield, he said, to guard him against General Noriega’s voodoo. “There are people who are concentrating their mental powers to crush me, but they will fail! My own power is far greater than theirs. See how I extend my hands with the palms facing upward? As I do this, I am receiving the positive energy from the universe. Now you can tell me what you wish to talk about. Anything. Anything at all. For instance, I am quite prepared to discuss the fraud that elected Nicky Barletta. In fact, the final preparations were made by General Noriega and myself right here in this room.”
“Here?” said the interviewer. “You planned it all right in this place?”
“It’s historic, no? The truth is that the real president of Panama is Arnulfo Arias Madrid, the man people voted for by a great majority.”
“This is quite shocking,” the interviewer said.
“If you are so easily shocked, I am worried for you,” said Roberto. “The murder of Spadafora, do you want to hear of that? Some have said that I am the intellectual author of this assassination, but I can tell you the truth: General Noriega planned this action personally, just as he also conspired with the American air force and the CIA to murder our beloved Omar Torrijos.”
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