God's Favorite

by Lawrence Wright

  “And do we have any idea where this cornered rat will turn?”

  “His wife and daughters have taken sanctuary in the Cuban embassy.”

  “Too obvious. The Americans will be waiting—with their rat traps.” The Nuncio stroked his unshaven chin. “There is, unhappily, a more likely alternative,” said the Nuncio. “He will come here.”

  “And what if he does?”

  “It’s a diplomatic disaster! We could be stuck with him forever! Remember Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty? He took refuge in the American embassy in Budapest in nineteen forty-eight, and the communists wouldn’t let him out for twenty-three years!”

  “But how can we deny Noriega sanctuary if he asks for it?”

  “We can’t let it get to that point. We must tell the Americans to put a cordon around the nunciature. Under no circumstances is Noriega to believe this sanctuary is available to him. I can see by your expression that you disapprove of this,” said the Nuncio, acknowledging Father Jorge’s pursed lips. “I know that international standards of diplomacy require us to protect political refugees. But the fact is that the Church does not wish to be involved in political matters, not at all! Unfortunately, everyone in Panama now sees us as an asylum for fugitives. When it was just an occasional political dissident who needed to be out of circulation for a few months—well, that was a different matter. Now we’re housing crooks and terrorists and even assassins. I can guarantee you that the Vatican will be furious! And despite the fact that Noriega is the de facto head of state, he is also a wanted man.”

  Father Jorge got up to make his calls. “By the way, Monseñor, what I feel is not disapproval but relief. I’ve never hated a man so completely. I am ashamed to admit it. If he were here, I don’t know how I might behave.”

  “Be careful, Father,” the Nuncio said gently. “In my experience, it’s exactly the questions we don’t wish to face about ourselves that God likes to pose.”

  CITIZENS OF PANAMA! Join me in resisting the Yanqui invader! Rise up and kill the enemy! A vast army of resistance is forming. Join with your neighbors and the patriots of Panama!” Tony’s dim, scratchy voice played across the airwaves of a pirate radio station on the other end of the phone line. “Together we will drive the gringos back into the canal and reclaim our country. Follow me! In the names of Bolívar, Guevara, Sandino, Villa, Martí—resist the imperialist! I salute you! This is your maximum leader, Manuel Antonio Noriega, signing off on Radio Free Panama!”

  “Tony, would you like another California roll?” asked Mrs. Escobar. She was standing beside the pool with a platter of sushi when Tony hung up the phone. In the background Elvis Presley was singing “Blue Christmas” on the stereo.

  Tony helped himself.

  “You don’t think they can track the call, do you?” asked Mrs. Escobar.

  “They need at least three minutes,” Tony told her authoritatively, pleased to be able to display his technical expertise.

  “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, do they?” she said admiringly.

  Tony was a bit alarmed by the fact that Mrs. Escobar was so young and beautiful and yet he was unmoved by her. The tension must be getting to him. Here he was in hiding, with a million-dollar bounty on his head and thousands of American soldiers hunting for him, and all he could think of was Carmen. Carmen Carmen Carmen. In all likelihood he would never see her again. She was probably lying in the sun in Miami Beach with her nose in a book, not giving him another thought. He had come so close to real love—or at least he thought he had. Carmen had saved his life, but she had done it more out of pity than love. Or out of obligation. Or whimsy. Who knew why women did what they did? Now he would never know. But at the time Tony had thought it was love. It felt like love might feel. And having experienced that feeling, even if it was a one-sided illusion, he could think of nothing else.

  Scar had been listening to Tony’s broadcast with an excited look in his eye. As soon as Mrs. Escobar returned to her chaise longue and began coating her long brown legs with cocoa butter, Scar leaned over and whispered eagerly, “Is that what we’re gonna do, Chief? Go to the jungles and fight the gringos?” He clapped his hand over his heart. “All my life, this has been my dream! You only have to say the word and I am at your side!”

  Tony looked at him wearily and took another sip of his drink. Mrs. Escobar made a clever little concoction of rum and crème de mocha in a coconut shell. Pablo called it a Poison Pussy. Pablo was currently floating in the pool like a small island.

  At first the sound of diesel engines did not cause alarm in the poolside coterie, but suddenly the clatter of boots caused Tony to leap out of his deck chair. “How do I get out of here?” he cried.

  Mrs. Escobar motioned him toward the cabaña. Tony and Scar ran inside and hid behind the bar, but of course it was the most obvious place imaginable.

  There was a deafening pounding, which Tony recognized as the sound of the front door being battered down. Then a Blackhawk helicopter leapt above the house out of nowhere; it seemed to have sprung out of the grass like a jaguar.

  “What are we going to do?” Tony asked frantically.

  “Go over the fence?” said Scar.

  “They’ll shoot me as soon as I show myself. Besides, it’s too high.”

  “We can fight it out.”

  “Your Uzi versus the American army?”

  Tony heard the door give way. The soldiers were racing through the house now. Scar made a motion and then dashed toward a pair of garbage cans in an alcove behind an acacia tree. Tony paused for a millisecond, then raced to the other can, clambering into it and placing the aluminum top on his head like a Chinese hat. He scrunched himself into as small a space as possible. The can was already partially filled with kitty litter and shrimp shells, and the top would not quite close. He could just see out a crack as the soldiers broke open the French doors and spilled onto the patio—about twenty of them, wearing armored suits and futuristic headgear and carrying weapons that Tony had never seen before. They looked like visitors from the twenty-second century.

  He noticed that Mrs. Escobar had taken off her bikini top and was painting her toenails on the chaise longue. You had to admire that woman.

  The soldiers stumbled to a breathless halt. “We are American soldiers,” the platoon leader said in halting Spanish.

  Mrs. Escobar looked up blankly. “Yes, you are.”

  The soldiers stared at her for a moment, taking in her terrific breasts. She went back to painting her nails.

  “We are looking for General Noriega.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Escobar.

  “Is he here?”

  “Do you see him? Then he’s not here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s my husband.”

  Pablo waved lazily.

  The platoon leader motioned for his men to fan out and search the area. Tony stopped breathing. The soldiers followed the barrels of their weapons in different directions, poking into the cabaña and the garden and the back side of the house. One of them fired into the dense foliage of an overhanging guayacan tree, spewing branches and the remnants of a squirrel nest into the sky and prompting a furious burst of curses from Mrs. Escobar. Tony suddenly got smaller. The lid of the trash can closed. He shut his eyes and crossed his fingers and began to pray.

  “Nothing?” said the platoon leader’s voice.

  “Zip. Nada.”

  “Okay,” said the platoon leader. “But we’ll be watching. First sign of him, we may drop a bomb on this place. Comprende?”

  “I’m sending you a bill for my door,” said Mrs. Escobar.

  Tony sat in the garbage and a pool of his own urine for another six hours, waiting for dark. There was a nearly constant whapping of helicopters passing overhead. Finally the lid was lifted and Tony looked up at Pablo Escobar. “This is it, Tony,” said Escobar. “You got lucky. Now you got to get gone. Jesus, what a smell.”

  “Are you sure they’ve left?” Tony crawled out
of the garbage, casting an envious look at Scar, whose can had nothing but paper trash in it.

  “The street is blocked at both ends,” said Escobar. “Look, don’t ask me to do anything else. You already brought too much trouble on my house.”

  “But the Yanquis are everywhere!”

  “I’ve thought about this before,” said Escobar. “There’s a manhole in the street. I don’t know where it goes, but it may be your only chance.”

  “Be careful, Tony,” Mrs. Escobar whispered.

  Tony and Scar crept through the house and the shattered doorway, which the servants had already begun to repair. Outside, they hid in the shrubbery while a helicopter passed overhead, shining its theatrical searchlight through the treetops. Beyond the gate was an old cobblestone street bathed in shadows. Barricades blocked either end of the street. Less than fifty feet away soldiers were talking to one another. One of them stood in front of the rearview mirror of a Humvee, applying a fresh coat of camouflage to his face.

  “There it is,” Scar whispered.

  Tony could just make out the darker circle in the shadows, like a puddle of oil in the street.

  “Wait for me to open it,” said Scar. He crawled into the street, struggled with the manhole cover, then suddenly rolled back into the shrubbery as a Humvee at one end of the block started up and filled the street with its headlights. The soldiers were coming directly at them. Tony and Scar squeezed against each other. Scar clicked off the safety on his Uzi.

  Clink, clink! The Humvee rolled over the half-opened manhole. But the soldiers in it did not seem to notice. They were listening to a report over their radio. “Roger, confirm the capture of General Noriega at twenty-two hundred hours,” the radio said.

  “But that’s not possible,” said Scar as the vehicle passed.

  “Of course not.”

  The men stood there for a moment. “It must be that American in the whorehouse,” said Tony. “They’ve captured one of their own people!” He began laughing out loud.

  “Shh, Chief. I don’t think they’ll be fooled for very long.”

  Scar wrestled the cover off the manhole, then insisted that Tony enter first so he could close the lid behind them. Tony balked. It was utter blackness down there. A light, funky breeze from the sewer blew into his face. Tony already smelled so bad himself that this new degradation seemed foreordained. He—who had once been so mighty! so charmed!—was being dragged back into the gutters whence he came. He placed a foot on the rusted ladder and began his descent. Every step echoed in the darkness. He sensed water somewhere below, but it was impossible to gauge dimensions. He looked up and saw stars glimmering in the sky, as bright as they might be if he were looking through a telescope. He was leaving the surface of the planet for some new chthonic existence in the netherworld. When Scar pulled the cover of the manhole back in place, even that little circle of light was snapped out. Now there was nothing. Foul oblivion.

  And sewage. Tony felt the liquid rushing into his tennis shoes. He drew his foot back and clung to the rungs of the ladder. Mixed into the sewage smells was some ammoniacal odor that cut through his sinuses like a switchblade. He wanted to cry out in despair, but he was so numbed by fear and disgust and the shock of the smell that he couldn’t speak. He was also gripped by a sudden chill. Plus he was becoming aware of a high-pitched squeaking noise that he desperately wanted not to identify.

  “Chief, keep going. I don’t want to step on you.”

  Tony drew a short breath, then stuck his foot back into the sewage. He did not feel the bottom.

  “We can’t just stay here,” said Scar several minutes later.

  Oh, to hell with it. Tony let go. The sewage was not as deep as he had feared—up to his crotch, no more. He waded a few cautious steps, waving his hands in front of his face as he groped for a wall. Every breath felt like acid down his throat. Moreover, the squeaking was hard to ignore. Tony sensed motion all around him. He heard Scar drop into the water behind him.

  “Chief?”

  “I’m here,” said Tony. “Have you got a match?”

  A few seconds later, Scar struck a match. A thousand beady bat eyes caught the reflection.

  Scar screamed. The match died in the gutter breeze.

  “Stop that,” Tony commanded.

  Scar choked and coughed.

  “Apparently we’re at an intersection,” said Tony. “There are four directions. How many more matches do you have?”

  Pause. “Three.”

  Strangely enough, Tony was beginning to feel resourceful. “We want to head toward Río Abajo. Nachman will meet us there.”

  “Gee, Chief, that’s miles away, and I don’t even know what direction we’re facing.”

  “This way is west,” said Tony. “At least we’re safe here. All we have to do is keep walking.”

  He turned into the flurry of wings and began to slog through the turbid liquid.

  CHAPTER 24

  WHERE WAS HE? For three days the twenty thousand invading soldiers, plus the twelve thousand Americans already stationed in Panama, plus a substantial portion of the Panamanian population, in the interest of rewards or vengeance, had combed the country looking for a single individual. There were alleged sightings of him everywhere, some of them supernatural—for instance, his face was manifested in a tapioca pudding served at the Pavo Real restaurant, exciting a group of legislators in Noriega’s party to make daily pilgrimages to the restaurant’s kitchen, hoping to adduce further evidence of the General’s divinity. Straw-filled effigies with pineapple heads hung from telephone poles all over town. But the real Noriega seemed to have been transported to some other dimension.

  During that time, looters had systematically appropriated every material object in every unguarded store in the country. An expanded economy of black-market entrepreneurs sprang up on the streets, openly hawking goods in front of the stores from which they were stolen. At Bon Bimi and Felix B. Maduro, upper-class housewives with discerning eyes scoured the shelves, removing bolts of Japanese textiles and place settings of Wedgwood china. Strange disparities occurred. Because of the shortage of refrigerated meat, two pounds of hamburger could be traded for a television set—televisions suddenly being in surplus. The downtown turned into a kind of street fair, with shoppers pushing heavily laden carts stolen from the supermarkets as last-minute looters stood in the desolate stores stripping window treatments, and television news crews filmed the naked mannequins and the festive mob while delivering moral judgments to the rest of the world. It was the best Christmas anyone had ever heard of.

  The Basque terrorists spent the entire day decorating the nunciature and serenading the kitchen staff with traditional songs of the holiday season. The Nuncio could almost forgive them for being responsible for General Noriega’s getting the Légion d’honneur. Even the nuns were in a cheerful mood despite the tireless effort they were making to feed the refugees, many of whom were quarrelsome and dangerous characters. Fortunately the Nuncio had been able to establish a separate colony of asylum seekers across the street, and Father Jorge had managed to place several dozen of them at various other legations. Most of the drug dealers and PDF officers had been farmed out to the Europeans, or to the Japanese, who had a bottomless interest in Panamanian affairs and had proved to be unusually accommodating. No doubt Japanese intelligence was feasting on their stories at this very minute. Sister Sarita had put the remaining refugees to work baking cookies and cutting out chains of paper angels.

  Father Jorge joined the Nuncio for a small lunch in the garden. So much had happened in the past few weeks that the two of them had not had time for their usual intimate chats. Father Jorge longed for the innocent pleasure of a time that now seemed beyond claiming, a time when he knew his calling and felt secure in God’s service. Now he even doubted the goodness of God’s intentions. Evil flourished, and wherever he saw the work of God there seemed also to be the trace of mischief.

  They began with a tureen of chilled soup. Both men we
re so exhausted they could scarcely eat. “The snoring,” said the Nuncio. “Last night sounded like Roman traffic in the middle of the day.”

  “The Hungarians took five more,” Father Jorge reported.

  The Nuncio stared stupidly at a blue butterfly that had settled on a hibiscus blossom.

  “You’d think there’d be more outrage,” Father Jorge said after a while.

  “Mmm?”

  “It’s been a continual party ever since the Americans landed. I’ve never heard of a people who were so happy to be occupied by a foreign army. And yet I still wonder at the need for the invasion. If the goal was to kidnap—or kill—Noriega, did they really need such a massive display of force? All those soldiers, and so far they’ve failed.”

  “It suggests that there is a larger design behind their stated goal,” said the Nuncio.

  “The canal?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? The U.S. wants to continue to control it despite the treaty that makes them surrender it a decade from now.”

  “You think they will abrogate the treaty?”

  “Control can be achieved by other means. The Americans had the opportunity to encourage a moderate successor from within the ranks of the PDF. For whatever reason, they failed to do this. Perhaps it was incompetence or uncertainty about the nature of the successor. Perhaps it was a debt to Noriega because of his long service to the CIA. But I think the real reason is more profound. The Americans have decided that the way to control the canal is to eliminate the PDF. That way the Panamanians will permanently depend on the Americans to defend the canal. This entire kidnapping scheme is a pretense for the destruction of the Panamanian military.”

  “But is that bad?” asked Father Jorge. “The whole institution is completely corrupt. Perhaps now the Panamanians have a chance to reform their country.”

  “I suppose,” said the Nuncio doubtfully. He forced himself to take another helping of the soup. “Soon this entire adventure will be over,” he mused aloud. “Given the present climate of opinion in the Vatican, I’ve begun to consider retirement. But the truth is, I don’t think I’m well suited for it. Compared to other alternatives, it may not be the worst destiny to befall a man my age. But I simply cannot picture myself sitting beside a cozy fire in some provincial cottage, much less rocking in a file of drooling priests on the porch of a geriatric monastery.”