Father Jorge slept fitfully. He could still feel Lucho’s lips on his, no matter how often he wiped his mouth. The kiss posed questions about himself that he did not want to face. He was frightened of Lucho but more frightened of the longing that the kiss had awakened.
“Get up, Father,” the pudgy guard said. He was holding a set of leg chains.
“What are you doing?” Lucho asked furiously.
“They want him,” the guard said simply.
“He’s mine!” Lucho said. “We have an agreement!”
The guard shrugged. He was a pig-faced man with eyes that were too indifferent to be thought of as cruel. “I have no control over this,” he said. “They want the priest.”
Father Jorge still had not moved.
“Get up,” the guard said again as he opened the cage.
Lucho took a few menacing steps toward the open gate, but then he suddenly stopped and slumped onto his cot and began to cry.
Father Jorge tentatively put his bare feet on the floor. He had not walked more than a few paces in a long time, and just standing made him feel faint. When he put weight on his feet, pain shot all the way through his body and into his shoulders. The madmen were strangely quiet. The guard fastened the irons around his legs. The chains were absurdly unnecessary; he was far more hobbled by his feet.
The stairwell was full of blinding sunlight, but instead of going up into the courtyard, the guard led him down the steps, into a lower basement. The hallway was almost black, but there was a room with a bare yellow bulb, and the guard pushed him toward the crack of light coming from the half-opened door.
The floor of the room was covered with stained sawdust, stinking of the blood that had already been shed there. A large man with a club in his belt gave him an appraising look, then smiled dismissively. “Sit,” he said.
Father Jorge sat in an armless wooden chair in the center of the room under the light.
The large man suddenly started coughing. He took an inhaler from his pocket and gave himself two quick bursts, and when he spoke his voice sounded high and wavery, as if he had been breathing laughing gas. “We have some questions for you, which you will answer. Don’t think about the alternative. I realize that you are a priest, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. I will gladly treat you just as we have treated the others—even worse if it suits me. Answer our questions and you can go. If you have any ideas about resisting us, put them out of your mind. You can make it easy or we can make you regret you were ever born.”
There were no instruments of torture that the priest could see. The pudgy guard and the other man both had clubs. He supposed that was all they needed. A few feet away a woman with a steno pad took a sharpened pencil from her purse and gave him an expectant look. In his cell, Father Jorge had rehearsed how he would respond to this moment. He had decided to face death with as much courage as he could summon.
“What do you want to know?” the priest asked. He was shocked at himself. The words seemed to come out of his mouth unbidden, as if they had their own right to exist. Within twenty minutes he had given them all the names that he could remember. He was surprised he had so little to say. His shame was great, but his longing for life was greater. Later he would believe that the splash of sunlight in the stairwell had undone him. After another hour the man with the inhaler opened the door and the pig-faced guard led him outside. His eyes filled with tears in the sunlight. He was free, but he was no longer the same man. No, he would never be the same man.
THE NUNCIATURE WAS subdued despite the many refugees who usually liked to congregate in the hallway or drink coffee and play bridge with the Nuncio in the dining room. For the past week the guests had been scrupulously silent, tiptoeing and whispering to keep from disturbing Father Jorge. Sister Sarita had been a nurse in her youth, and she had skillfully lanced the infection in his feet and extracted the remaining shards of glass. The bones of his jaw had begun to knit back together, but the priest was still in constant pain. One of the refugees, the owner of a Jaguar dealership, made a telephone call and soon a small package arrived at the nunciature. Sister Sarita took it into the kitchen, where the Nuncio found her mixing white powder into a saucepan.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“Heroin,” she said nonchalantly.
“Sister! Holy Mother of God! You can’t have such things in this place! Of all things!”
“It’s a narcotic, like any other he would have if you would let him go to a real hospital,” she said defiantly. “And if you think I’m going to let that beautiful young man suffer any more without painkillers, you are very much mistaken.”
The Nuncio bit his tongue. He didn’t want to let Father Jorge out of his sight, and he depended on Sister Sarita to take care of him.
Soon Father Jorge was resting better, although an intermittent fever still raged. Except for the penicillin and heroin injections, the Nuncio took on most of the nursing tasks himself. Some redness and signs of infection still remained, but after a few days the swelling subsided. Father Jorge slept and slept. It was as if he didn’t want to be awake. Whenever he came to, they stuffed him with bouillon and Jell-O.
The Civic Crusade met Tuesday evenings in the library of the nunciature. These gatherings had become increasingly crowded, in part because of the refugees, who were always present, but also because the resistance movement had been revitalized by the American attempts to remove General Noriega from power. Spontaneous strikes and protests broke out nearly every day despite the brutality of the PDF. Noriega’s spies planted rumors at a Lions Club luncheon that any demonstrator who was sent to La Modelo a second time would be raped by prisoners with AIDS. Most people thought it was a characteristic bit of psychological warfare on the General’s part, but there were enough infected prisoners to make the threat sound credible. In any case, no one who had been there wanted to return.
One day, with no prior notice, the trial of Roberto Díaz Herrera came on television, interrupting a game show. A nun came running to the Nuncio and told him to turn on his set. Until then no one had known what had happened to Roberto since the attack on his mansion. Most people thought he had been killed, so the trial caught everyone by surprise. It was a weird piece of political stagecraft. The prosecutor was a harried young woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who waddled around the courtroom with her hands pressed to the small of her back. She charged Roberto with “an attack against the internal personality of the state,” a crime no one had ever heard of. Finally the camera turned to the defendant. Roberto looked dazed but unmarked. The Nuncio suspected that he had been drugged. “Yes, I declare myself guilty,” Roberto said in a slurred voice. The whole affair was over in minutes. Roberto was transported to a military prison on Coiba, which was famous for the number of prisoners who had “hanged themselves” in their cells.
So the mood in the library was both grim and pragmatic. Most of the members of the Civic Crusade were unwilling revolutionaries, more comfortable in their boardrooms or drinking cocktails in the lobby of the Marriott. They were frightened by the dark road ahead and the prospect of violence, exile, and personal ruin. They were also chastened by the revolutions of Nicaragua and El Salvador and the damage that had been done to those tragic republics. Until recently, no one had believed that Panama would ever sink into that circle of hell, but they had been to enough funerals now to realize that anything could happen. They were not even certain that they were secure in the nunciature; if Noriega was willing to stoop to assassination, why should he hesitate to violate the sanctuary of a foreign embassy? A truckload of soldiers waited on the corner of Avenida Balboa, making this scenario seem very likely.
The last thing the civic leaders wanted was for the Left to seize control of the opposition; indeed, the great paradox was that Hugo Spadafora, the martyred symbol of the resistance, was the creature they feared most—a romantic leftist revolutionary. If Hugo had still been alive, nearly everyone in the library would have secretly sided with Noriega. They wanted s
omething unthinkable in Central America, a bourgeois coup. It troubled the Nuncio that the entire revolution seemed to be a revolt on the part of the white upper class against the mestizo lower class that Noriega represented.
Some of the most prominent businesspeople and political figures in the country were present, including some who had been bloodied in the streets or in Roberto’s mansion: Guillermo Endara, a corpulent attorney whose black glasses were perpetually sliding down his nose; Aurelio Barría, president of the Chamber of Commerce, who had succeeded the murdered Serafín Mitrotti as head of the opposition; and Ricardo Arias Calderón, the stern and slender philosophy professor they called “the Monk” because of his ascetic habits. Arias Calderón had been waging a fearless and nearly solitary struggle against the military dictatorship most of his life. Even Naomi Amaya, the country’s most famous madam, was present. The Nuncio secretly admired her as a formidable source of information.
Jack Tarpley, the American ambassador, also slipped in the now-famous back door of the nunciature, along with a political attaché and a security officer who scanned the library for listening devices before the meeting began. The Nuncio was astonished that nothing was found.
The ambassador began by describing American efforts to persuade General Noriega to leave Panama peacefully. They were two-pronged. One plan being developed with certain Panamanian exiles (whose names were not mentioned but were known to everyone) provided that Noriega and his top officers would step down and new elections would be held. The negotiations were currently snagged on the question of the General’s indictment on drug charges in Florida. Noriega wanted the indictment quashed; the Reagan administration was reluctant to interfere in an independent legal proceeding, even though it seemed unlikely that the General would ever face trial. Some monetary inducements surfaced to sweeten the deal. While that line was being pursued, the administration had also frozen all Panamanian assets in the United States. The strategy, as the ambassador explained it, was to paralyze the Panamanian economy and make it impossible for General Noriega to operate.
“You are talking about destroying the very people in this room—the people who are leading the opposition,” said the head of the Coca-Cola bottling plant. “We’ll be the hardest hit—and Tony will just laugh at us. Meanwhile, our employees will suffer. God knows how long we’ll be able to pay them.”
“Even General Noriega has to make a payroll,” Ambassador Tarpley pointed out. “We think the best way of causing dissension in the ranks of the PDF is to make it clear that nobody gets paid until the boss steps aside.”
“You’re encouraging a military coup, in other words,” Endara said.
“We’d certainly welcome a change in leadership, however it comes about.”
“So we have a coup; what keeps us from getting another Noriega?” Arias Calderón asked. “As long as the military runs the country, does it really matter who runs the military? It’s the system that needs to be changed, and the way to change the system is to eliminate the PDF altogether.”
“Of course it matters who runs the military,” said Marta Ungo, the wizened society columnist for Radio Impacto. She was eighty years old and had dyed her hair bright red. She was also the only Panamanian in the room who carried a U.S. visa in her passport, a matter of extraordinary prestige and gravity in this country. “We need a strong man to lead us. You know that Panamanians can never govern themselves.”
This statement led to outbursts from all sides of the room. Ungo was not alone in her sentiments. There were still many Torrijistas who longed for the relatively benign paternalism of those days. They remembered that it was Torrijos who had negotiated the canal treaties, but nostalgia had allowed them to forget that it was Torrijos who created Noriega and used him to turn the country into a criminal police state.
“There is a much better solution than this policy of economic starvation,” said a small man in a pink polo shirt whom the Nuncio didn’t know. “It’s obvious—the gringos should just open the gates of Fort Clayton and drive their tanks to the Comandancia. Who could really resist them? Seriously, do you think the PDF would engage them? Not at all. It would be over in minutes. And then you could take Pineapple Face to Miami and put him in jail, where he belongs. We would all be happy about this, wouldn’t we? So I think the Americans should just do this favor for everyone, and tomorrow we can start building our country again.”
From the way others were nodding assent, the Nuncio realized the man in the pink shirt was voicing the unspoken wishes of the majority of the people in this room. They dreaded seeing their businesses ruined, their employees out of work. The threat of La Modelo weighed constantly on their minds. Also, many of them frankly held the United States responsible for creating Noriega in the first place and supporting him as he helped the narcos extend their filthy empire. Why shouldn’t the Americans take care of the problem they helped to create? Perhaps it was as easy as the man suggested.
As the Nuncio thought about it, however, he saw how easily such a plan could go wrong. Suppose the PDF resisted valiantly—how many casualties was the United States prepared to sacrifice? Even though Noriega was not an elected head of state, everyone recognized him as the Panamanian leader, and the precedent of knocking down a barracks to kidnap the commander in chief was a diplomatic taboo. One could only imagine the fuss this nouveau gunboat imperialism would stir up in other Latin countries. The Japanese and the Europeans would seize the opportunity to negotiate preferential trade treaties at the expense of the Americans. Moreover, Noriega was the prince of chaos. If he could hold off the Americans for a few weeks, he would gain the upper hand. He could use the opportunity to incite people against the Yanqui aggressor, making himself into a nationalist hero rather than a dictatorial drug lord. His Dignity Battalion would own the streets and wage class warfare in the name of national pride. And looming over the entire fiasco was the fate of the strategically critical but so vulnerable and easily sabotaged Panama Canal—the jugular vein of the Americas. It dawned on the Nuncio that the man in the pink shirt was probably an agent provocateur. Of course, Noriega would have his spies here. It would be naive to think otherwise.
And yet, what could be done about it? Without evidence, the Nuncio couldn’t throw the man out, and even if he did, there were likely others in the room who were providing information. In the Nuncio’s experience, the best way of dealing with a traitor was to feed him information one would want him to have, whether accurate or not.
“The United States has no interest in intervening militarily,” the ambassador said quickly. “We have to work as best we can within the structure of legitimate authority. And so we must start by acknowledging that the United States continues to recognize Eric Arturo Delvalle as the legally constituted president of Panama—even though your parliament has nominally removed him.”
The ambassador’s voice was overridden by loud objections from the fifty-odd Panamanians present. “With all due respect, Jack, we can never support that clown,” said Arias Calderón. “He doesn’t even have the nerve to appear in public. He’s still hiding in his vacation house at the racetrack.”
“And how can you call him the legal president anyway?” Barría shouted passionately. “This man conspired to overthrow Nicky Barletta. This is a crime—even though Barletta was fraudulently elected in the first place.”
“We need a clean slate,” Naomi Amaya said as the others noisily agreed.
Ambassador Tarpley waved his hands to quell the uproar. “I know that Delvalle is tarnished goods, but whatever action is taken, it must have the appearance of advancing democracy. Believe me, we are looking for a Panamanian solution to this crisis, but until then we have to have someone—anyone—that we can deal with on a legitimate basis. And it must be someone that everyone in this room agrees upon. Otherwise, the opposition will be divided, and then—forget it. The revolution is over. Noriega will stay in control. So unless you have a sudden change in the power structure—call it a coup or whatever you will—our positi
on is that Delvalle is the lesser evil.”
“He may be less evil, but Delvalle is still worse than Noriega,” said Ungo, pricking the air with her silver cigarette holder. “Delvalle is weak and stupid. We cannot have such a man in control. Who knows how he might be used? Besides, he’s unforgivably boring.”
The Nuncio looked around the room. On this point Ungo was victorious.
“Perhaps there is another alternative,” the Nuncio said. “I advance this suggestion merely as an observation, since it is not my place to appear partisan. But were the Civic Crusade to create its own political party, with its own slate of candidates, then you would have the opportunity to endorse the restoration of Mr. Delvalle to the office of president while at the same time indicating your opposition by campaigning against him.”
The ambassador looked at the Nuncio with undisguised admiration. “I think it’s a stroke of genius,” he said.
As the meeting was ending, the Nuncio put a hand on the shoulder of the man in the pink shirt. He felt him startle. “I appreciate your comment,” the Nuncio said casually. “But the truth is the gringos will never overthrow Tony. They will buy him out—it’s the best solution for everyone. He can’t stay in power forever. This way, he gets paid for his trouble, and life goes on. What do you think?”
“Why—I suppose you’re right, Monseñor,” the little man said nervously.
“Yes, if we all behave sensibly, no one needs to be harmed,” the Nuncio said, “on either side. Because one day Tony Noriega will be gone, and those who supported him will face the consequences. Better for everyone to find a peaceful solution.”
The Nuncio could tell by the expression in the man’s eyes that the point had been made. He could only hope that the message would be delivered.
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