Voices inside the apartments cried out for help, but Father Jorge could not stop for them. People were dragging their belongings into the street. Two men were absurdly trying to shove a piano through a doorway. The people trapped behind them were screaming in terror and rage. The strangeness was so powerful that he was not even sure which entrance led to Gloria’s apartment, but when he stumbled into a doorway, he recognized the broken bicycle in the ruined foyer. He tripped on the missing steps and vaguely registered that he had cut himself somehow. But he could think of nothing else but her.
Her door was open. Glass from the windows lay scattered all over the floor and the wall was pocked with bullet holes. The Christmas tree had been knocked to the floor, its ornaments strewn around the room. He looked in the closet. She was nowhere. He ran back into the smoke-filled hallway and stumbled downstairs into the blazing street.
She must be looking for Renata at the convent school, down by the bay on Avenida de los Poetas. Father Jorge ran through the dark street where the fire had not yet arrived. There were television sets and odd appliances lying around that people had tried to carry with them but then had jettisoned in the confusion.
Ahead of him the shadows moved. A figure stepped forth, and then a dozen more. The priest could see the darker outlines of their weapons.
“Who are you?” The voice was very young.
Father Jorge wanted to rush on past them, but there was something predatory and taunting in the way they held themselves, like a pack of wolves. He identified himself and slowed down but decided that stopping altogether was dangerous.
They demanded his money. He was surprised to find that he had a few dollars in his pocket, which he tossed onto the street.
“Are you really a priest?” one of them asked. The tone of his voice was insistent, not curious. “Stop, I want to talk to you.”
Father Jorge kept walking.
“Are you a priest?” the boy repeated.
“I said I was.”
“Am I going to hell, Father?”
Father Jorge stopped. He looked at the boy. In the light of the fires and the moon it was difficult to tell how old he was, but he looked no more than fifteen. No facial hair. Still some baby fat in his features. His youth served only to make him more menacing. Father Jorge asked the boy his name.
“You don’t need to know my name, Father. Just answer my question.”
“The answer is yes.”
Father Jorge heard them all giggling like children as he hurried away.
The convent school was closed. The windows had been broken and the school vandalized. Father Jorge thought he heard some noise or movement inside. He pushed the broken casement of a shot-out window and the entire structure collapsed into one of the schoolrooms. He stepped into the room and again called Gloria’s name.
Every room appeared to be empty, yet the chapel was still lit with candles. Father Jorge took one of the candelabra and walked through the wrecked hallway. Then he heard something quite distinct and he went into the small gymnasium.
It wasn’t easy to see beyond the glow of candlelight, but he made out two figures on the bleachers.
“Gloria?”
“Is that you, Father?” It was Teo’s voice.
He was sitting on a bleacher. Gloria was lying against him. She seemed to be staring at him, but when he could see her more clearly he realized that her eyes were fixed and no longer full of questions. Teo was holding her bloody head in his lap, like some perverse Pietà. Father Jorge knelt beside her and took her hand, which was already cold as marble.
Teo was stroking her hair and staring into the candlelight in a trance. The Boba Fett doll hung around his neck.
“Who did this?” Father Jorge demanded.
Teo turned his dull eyes toward him, then looked back into the candles. “Does it matter?”
The priest fought an impulse to slap the boy. “How did it happen?” he asked.
“It was just a mistake,” said Teo. Some kind of automatic weapon lay at his side.
“Tell me,” the priest insisted.
“We were doing our business, and she got in the way.”
“You killed her?”
“No, one of the boys. She was running toward us, shouting something. He just shot her. It was a mistake. It was all a big fucking mistake.”
For a moment, Father Jorge hated him. He hated the stupidity, the anger, the craziness of the mob. He hated Teo for being a part of it. Then he realized he was angry at God, not at Teo. It was God who had tempted him with the prospect of an ordinary happy life. Now God had taken that possibility away. He wanted to scream and cry. Instead, he put his hand on Teo’s, which were sticky with his mother’s blood, and the boy fell sobbing into Father Jorge’s embrace.
GENERAL HONEYCUTT entered the command center of the Tunnel to the sound of a great ovation. His officers were cheering and slapping high-fives, along with a contingent of civilians that the general had never seen before.
A huge relief map of Central America dominated the room, with the individual units of American and PDF forces indicated by flags. No one was paying attention to that, however. The real interest was directed to the bank of television monitors on the wall that broadcast the war from low-orbit satellites and high-flying observation aircraft in infrared and with special thermo-sensitive devices. The atmosphere in the room was like that of a sporting event. On one of the monitors there was real-time footage of the wounded soldiers stumbling about in the dark ruins of the Comandancia. The thermal images of the dying men were gradually fading from the screen.
“Resistance is very spotty, General,” said Lieutenant Cheever. “Mainly at the airport. A squad of SEALS got hit when they tried to take out Noriega’s jet. No casualty report yet. Other than that, about a dozen broken legs in the Eighty-second.”
“What about Panamanian casualties?”
“Too early to tell. Some Digbats are shooting up the place.”
“When this settles down, there’ll be hell to pay to get those characters to disarm,” said the general.
“That’s when the new modifications we made to the Sheridans will really show their stuff, General,” said one of the civilians, who wore a beautifully tailored khaki shirt with epaulets and a watch that cost as much as a cruise missile.
“The invasion really does appear to have been a complete surprise,” said Cheever.
“A slam dunk,” said another civilian, who was wearing some kind of safari outfit from L. L. Bean.
“Who are all these people?” the general asked under his breath.
“Industry people,” Cheever replied. “Pentagon sent ’em down. Lockheed, TRW, Northrup, General Dynamics—this is a huge tryout of new products, after all.”
“But these guys aren’t engineers.”
“No, sir.”
The general realized with a start that he was in a roomful of lobbyists.
“We’re particularly proud of our new F-117A stealth fighter,” said a man who therefore would have to be from Northrup. “Absolutely no radar picture at all. Slipped into local airspace like a cat burglar. They never knew what hit ’em.”
“Unfortunately, that aircraft bombed the wrong facility,” said Cheever. “It appears to have struck a school a thousand feet from the air base we targeted.”
“Oh, my God—a school?” the general said.
“We’re trying to get casualty figures now.”
“Pilot error,” the Northrup man said. “Even the best piece of equipment can’t overcome human frailty. But we keep trying!”
“How ’bout them AC-130 SPECTREs?” said the Lockheed representative. “They turned the Comandancia into Swiss cheese in seventeen seconds. I timed it.”
“Terrific success, General,” said the safari suit. “A really great war.”
“Operation Just Cause is not a war,” the general snarled. “It’s not even a proper invasion. It’s a goddamn abduction, and so far it’s been a catastrophic failure. Unless one of you geniuses
has a gizmo that will kidnap a foreign leader and extradite him to Miami, then I’ll ask you to keep out of my way.”
General Honeycutt turned and stormed out of the Tunnel, muttering to himself. Thirty years had passed since he’d been in combat, and now, as he came out on the hillside, the actual war lay at his feet, unfolding in front of him in earsplitting splendor. Irregular spats of gunfire erupted in pockets all across the city. Madness was afoot as always in war, and yet the fighting was scheduled to end in forty-five minutes. After that, it was a matter of mopping up, keeping the looters under control, and finding the man who had brought this all down on himself.
“I’ll find you, you moonfaced son of a bitch,” the general vowed. Then he said a quick prayer, asking for forgiveness. He had forgotten how much he loved war.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night, the American ambassador’s car picked its way through the potholes and debris on Avenida Fourth of July. The fires of Chorrillo were still burning, illuminating the entire city in an orange glow and brightly outlining the looming shapes of the office buildings. Christmas decorations—bells and angels and stars—festooned the unlit streetlights.
As he watched Chorrillo burn through the darkened windows of the ambassador’s Lincoln, the Nuncio worried about Father Jorge and silently prayed for him—and all the desperate citizens of that accursed neighborhood. He also wondered what fresh catastrophe would be awaiting him at the nunciature. He steeled himself for the worst.
“It looks bad now, but it’s all cosmetic,” Ambassador Tarpley was saying. “Insurance will cover most of the damage. No doubt my government will provide emergency loans and reparations as well. In a few months, this place’ll look better than ever.”
Tarpley had been a real-estate developer in San Diego, and the Nuncio supposed his assessment was correct. On the other hand, he remembered the dozens of body bags that were laid out in a field outside the gates of Albrook Field when he arrived an hour ago. Death was not a recoverable asset, even for the mighty United States.
Downtown there was a blaring traffic jam. Except for the headlights of the cars and the floodlights that the Americans had established around their positions and the spooky beams of helicopters roaming between the skyscrapers, there were no lights. Despite the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning, people were swarming all over the streets, plodding along under tottering loads of merchandise. Some were wearing five or six layers of clothing, with the tags still attached. The Nuncio watched as looters brazenly sledgehammered shopwindows and loaded grocery carts with cameras, furs, and electronic equipment. Burglar alarms screeched and clanged. A cabdriver waited patiently as a young woman filled his trunk with dresses still on hangers. At a Texaco station, a team of men methodically removed the gasoline pumps. A dozen young boys emerged from a sporting-goods store riding brand-new bicycles and carrying scuba tanks and water skis. Not one of the boys could be older than ten. They must think that the Americans have come to turn them into Americans, the Nuncio decided ungraciously, considering the courtesy the ambassador had extended him and the delirium with which Panama welcomed the invasion. Several times, as the Lincoln stopped in traffic, people had come up to the ambassador’s car and pressed their joyous faces against the tinted glass. Another gang of looters rushed out of a bank and ran right through a nativity scene, knocking over a statue of Joseph in their haste to break into another store. Across the street a shopkeeper with a pistol in his hand nervously watched the thieves, who were also armed. Then the shopkeeper and the looters both noticed the American flag on the Lincoln and they spontaneously burst into applause. The Nuncio thought it was the strangest encounter he had ever seen.
On the corner several soldiers stacked sandbags around a machine gun. Two American military policemen, their faces painted in camouflage, sat in a Humvee at an intersection, listening to the radio and chatting with a pair of schoolgirls as looters paraded by, modeling their new outfits. “It’s a damn disgrace,” said Tarpley, “but my people tell me it’s the best way of defusing resistance. Half the looters are PDF or Digbats, and we’d rather have them out stealing stereos than fighting us. In the meantime, our troops will consolidate control. On balance, it’s less costly in human terms.”
The Nuncio breathed easier when the ambassador’s car turned into the drive of the still-standing nunciature. The residence was completely dark except for candlelight coming from some of the rooms.
“I’ll see you to your door,” said Tarpley.
Sister Sarita answered the knock carrying a kerosene lamp. “Oh, Señor Ambassador! Welcome!” she said in a stage whisper. “And Monseñor—I can see you are so tired from your trip. Let me get Manuelito to help you with your bag.”
“I wish I had a bag, Sister. Unfortunately, it was lost,” the Nuncio said testily.
“We had to put the Nuncio on an air force transport from Miami to get him here,” Tarpley explained. “Somehow, in all the confusion . . .”
“Invading small countries is such a lot of trouble, it’s no wonder that luggage gets lost,” the Nuncio said. “Here, I won’t require your bullet-proof vest any longer.” As he removed the cumbersome object, the Nuncio felt embarrassed and somewhat cowardly for wanting to keep it.
“Remember, Padre, if you hear any news about that rascal’s whereabouts, you must give me a call.”
“I’m flattered to think that the United States of America, with its listening devices and satellite reconnaissance and its army of paid spies, would have any need for the intelligence of a simple man of God.”
“Well, if you actually were a simple man of God, I wouldn’t bother asking,” said the ambassador.
As the ambassador left, the Nuncio followed Sister Sarita into the reception hall. The lamp in the nun’s hand cast spectral shadows onto the walls.
“Is everyone safe?” the Nuncio asked. “Where is Father Jorge? I’ve been—”
“Shhh! Lower your voice, Monseñor.”
Only then did he notice the shapes of bodies splayed out on the floor of the hall and lying on the couches and chairs. “Lord above! What have we here?”
“Narcotraffickers, police torturers, members of Noriega’s death squad, a Basque terrorist group, even the minister of immigration,” said the nun in a hushed tone. “The nunciature is overflowing with them.”
“Señor Ortega?”
“Apparently the gringos found a cocaine laboratory in his office. Also President Solís Palma and the head of the secret police. He climbed over the garden wall about an hour ago.”
“How many are they?”
“Around three hundred,” the nun replied, “and they continue to come. Every hour there is another knock on the door.”
The Nuncio sighed in resignation. Cardinal Falthauser would never believe this.
Fortunately his library remained sacrosanct. Sister Sarita set the lantern on the Nuncio’s desk, beside a pile of mail and newspapers. Despite the circumstances, he was relieved to be back in this comfortable room. He realized how much he was going to miss it when the reckoning came.
He spent an hour sorting through urgent messages from other diplomatic missions, reporting their own distressed situations, and from desperate Panamanians looking for missing family members. Although he was exhausted from travel and confusion, there was no time to rest. Food and bedding for the refugees had to be secured, new quarters found for most of them, medical aid rendered, and then the inevitable report to Cardinal Falthauser written. The Nuncio wished that he had been able to sleep on the bumpy air force transit; it was hard to know when he would be able, in good conscience, to lay his head down again.
At dawn there was a tap on his door, and the Nuncio looked up to see the haggard face of Father Jorge. The two men embraced and then stared at each other wordlessly for a moment. The Nuncio immediately detected that there was something deeply changed in the young man’s expression. For the first time since he had known him, his secretary appeared no longer young. But there was no time to explore this now. �
��I can’t tell you how worried I was about your safety,” the Nuncio said. “Is everything in the parish destroyed?”
“The entire neighborhood has burnt to the ground,” Father Jorge said mournfully. “And yet somehow the church and the parish buildings escaped damage. There was a small breeze that kept the fire moving west. Had it gone in the other direction, we would have lost it all, but God chose to spare us, apparently. Despite that, the gringos shut the church down and ordered us to stay out of the neighborhood.”
“What happened to the refugees?”
“The Americans set up centers for them at the high school in Balboa. There are thousands of them camped on the football field.”
The Nuncio sat heavily in his library chair. “We’ve got a refugee camp of our own, evidently. I suppose we can put some of them in the convent school, at least until the new government gets a chance to establish itself.”
“But they are seeking sanctuary. I doubt they will want to leave the nunciature.”
“In fact, the nunciature is wherever I say it is. If I wish to extend its province to the convent school, that is within my power. And certainly we cannot support three hundred refugees. We will have to find other embassies willing to accept them. This must be made clear to everyone in the morning.”
“I’ve already spoken to the Cubans and the Nicaraguans,” said Father Jorge. “They’re overwhelmed as well.”
“Then we must turn to the Europeans. Believe me, the Vatican is not going to supplement our meager allotment, no matter how great the catastrophe. At this rate the nuns will be reduced to pilfering the grocery stores like everyone else. We cannot have it.”
“I’ll make some calls right away,” said Father Jorge.
“What about Noriega? Do we have any idea where he is?”
“People say he is in the jungles calling for armed resistance.”
The Nuncio laughed. “More likely he’s in a Colombian whorehouse calling for a whiskey soda.”
“In either case, the borders are sealed, his army is collapsing, even his closest aides are making deals with the prosecutors. He has no one to turn to. I hear the Americans have placed a million-dollar bounty on his head. He’s a cornered rat.”
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