Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I stretched, tossed my shirt and hat on the bed, and pulled on my denims and socks. I shook out my boots, a wise habit from living in places where any kind of critter might crawl inside during the night.

  A folded piece of paper fluttered to the floor from the left boot.

  Had someone been in my room while I slept?

  No. I’d left my boots and hat unattended in the bathroom at the villa the night before. Easy enough to slip the paper into my boot there.

  I sighed. I was tired of intrigue. But not so tired of it that I could ignore my curiosity. I opened it to see feminine handwriting: Please join me at the bullring in Panama City this afternoon for the beginning of the fight. The time and location will be easy enough for you to find. I will be across from the Chinese restaurant.

  It was signed by Odelia Cordet.

  Well, enough was enough. I had no intention of meeting her. I’d pass along regrets to Miskimon and ask him to inform her that I had departed the isthmus.

  Sitting on the edge of my chair, I slipped on my boots. Boots go on as soon as possible—this was another habit from endless mornings waking out of doors, where it made no sense to give buttoning a shirt priority while I hopped around barefoot in mud or thistles or ice or snow. I had a great amount of affection for my boots. The leather was supple and the fit perfect.

  It wasn’t until the final stages of dressing, then, that I found what had been tucked into my folded shirt—a small stack of photographs in a large envelope, each about the size of a sheet of letter paper, wrapped in wax paper to protect them from the humidity.

  The stack was upside down, and I looked at the backing of the top photograph. Had these, too, been placed there by Odelia Cordet? While it was possible, given that the laundry had been taken away from the bathroom, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  My first impulse was renewed irritation. I was leaving. I didn’t want any more bother. Curiosity, again, triumphed.

  I flipped over the photographs.

  It was the same letdown as when I unfurled the flag. The first was a photograph of a typewritten sheet of paper, as was the second, third, fourth, and fifth, with each photograph plainly showing a seal and sets of signatures.

  I set the photographs in order and examined the first one more closely. While not quite as clear as reading the original, everything was legible.

  CONSTITUTION OF THE NEW REPUBLIC OF PANAMA

  Preamble

  With the ultimate purpose to strengthen the Nation; to guarantee the freedom, ensure democracy and institutional stability, exalt human dignity, promote social justice, general welfare, regional integration and invoking the protection of God, we, the undersigned, decree the Political Constitution of the new Republic of Panama.

  I set the photographs down, giving them as much room as I would an angry rattlesnake. What I was holding…

  …was treason.

  Punishable by execution.

  “Can you tell me what you know about the events of November 1903?” I studied Earl Harding.

  I’d found him again at the same sidewalk café, shortly after the first train from Culebra to Ancón had delivered me once again to Panama City.

  “That would be the revolution of Panama against Colombia.” He pursed his lips. “But you could just as easily go the Star & Herald and get the information yourself. Haven’t I already done enough for you?”

  I’d woken him at his hotel by telephone and asked for copies of some newspaper clippings and a chance to buy him another breakfast at his earliest convenience.

  “Even if the Star & Herald presented those events in an unbiased manner,” I said, “I’ve learned that rumors travel fast. I’m not sure I’d like anyone in this city to know what I’m looking for. I have an aversion to electricity applied to tender parts of my body.”

  Harding gave me a wolf smile. “I like the implications here. If you know something that is dangerous, it must be of value.”

  “I’m just looking for general information.” And hoping that the National Police didn’t learn what I was doing.

  Harding tapped a manila envelope on the table. “General information. Along with newspaper clippings with photos of Cromwell, Sandoval, and Amador?”

  “Still general information.”

  “That you did not want to retrieve yourself.”

  I held the lives of fifteen or so people in my hands. These weren’t the types of conversations I was accustomed to navigating. I didn’t want him to know how jumpy I was. I sighed. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “It’s how I make my living.” He leaned forward. “And it’s a living based on the fact that I’ve never betrayed a confidence. Because if I did, no one would ever trust me with a new confidence again. Why are you asking me these things? Does it have anything to do with the little uproar you caused at the Sandoval ranch last night? I’ve already heard that you and Miskimon were about as popular as men handing out lumps of horse manure.”

  “Will you tell me about 1903, or do I need to look for another way to learn what I need to learn?”

  “Cowboy, your original promise still good?”

  “If I ever speak to a reporter, you’ll be the one and only.”

  “Fair enough. I get the sense that you’re too stubborn to let me push you much more than that.”

  Harding needed to talk faster. The National Police might even now be looking for me— Ah. Of course. That’s what was bothering me.

  Across the street, at a similar sidewalk café…hadn’t I seen that man before? I leaned back, hands locked behind my neck, as if surveying the neighborhood in the manner of a tourist.

  Yes. Alone at a table was the Spaniard I’d seen in the administration office on my first morning in Panama. Then, he’d had slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache. And last night…he was the waiter giving me the hostile glances. For all I knew, he was the man at the end of the tracks yesterday, monitoring my movements, or the man outside the alley on the night I’d walked the beach with Raquel.

  “All right,” Harding said, unaware, of course, of the surge of adrenalin I felt in noticing that I’d been followed. “Here’s the short of it. In 1903, Manuel Amador Guerrero, who became Panama’s first president, was chosen by a small separatist network to travel to the United States to garner support for a revolution against Colombia. It was a very small group. They wrote their own constitution and designed their own flag because they wanted everything to be ready once the Americans showed up with a warship to block the harbor. They—”

  I stood. “Thanks.”

  “What?”

  Cromwell had suckered me and Miskimon into unfurling that flag at his party. It wouldn’t take long for Harding to figure out the significance of it, given my questions. “I’m aware that I should let you ramble a little while longer so it wouldn’t be quite so clear what information I need. But sooner or later, you’d figure it out anyway. And I’m pressed for time.”

  I’d landed in the middle of a second revolution. This was a deadly type of politics. I was not safe in this country. I needed to reach the American Zone—Ancón—but that meant somehow making it through Panama City untouched. With a spy right across the street.

  I said, “Do me a favor, would you—”

  Harding arched a brow. “Nothing I do is a favor. It’s all about payback.”

  “Then take a chance that I’ll owe you for a long time. Find Waldschmidt and ask him to take a train to Culebra. I’ll be waiting for him at the administration office at noon.”

  He gave me a cynical smile. “Sure. We’ll see where it leads.”

  I grabbed my hat, threw down payment for breakfast, and started to stroll down the street—then spun and sprinted to the café on the other side of the street.

  It didn’t fool the Spaniard with the thin mustache. He pushed away from his table and toppled over some chairs to block my pursuit, then dashed into the café. By the time I made it inside, he’d disappeared. Probably through the kitchen, because a tall
cook stood at the door, arms crossed and his face set in an imposing glare.

  I turned back to the sidewalk, and Harding was there, waiting for me.

  “What was that about?” he asked as I joined him.

  “Chasing a ghost.” I walked away slowly, as if it were a leisurely day, and doing my best to give no sign that I was fleeing to save my life.

  I stood on a massive man-made hill, photographs of revolutionary papers still with me, pretending to continue Goethals’s investigation. It was a necessary deception if I was going to get the information about the papers I needed from the man in front of me. Oliver MacDonald, the foreman of this area of the dam construction. He was a roly-poly man whose face transformed into the Cheshire Cat with each grin, and MacDonald could rival Harry Franck for chattiness.

  “Let me tell you about last month’s congressional delegation,” MacDonald said. “The colonel was here, right where you are standing, and looking that way.”

  He pointed almost due south, at jungle hills rising about five or six miles away. In that span of lowland, thousands of acres had been razed, leaving behind stumps of once-magnificent mahogany trees in the swamp formed by slowly rising water.

  “Right here,” I said to echo him. A half mile to the east were the Gatún Locks, and construction sounds carried clearly to us. The day before, my chat with the foreman there had been much less congenial than this.

  MacDonald could afford the luxury, though. The dam was close to completion, and therefore he felt none of the urgency of his counterparts in the other two divisions.

  “Yes, right here,” MacDonald said. “And let me tell you, those congressmen thought they were the most important officials of the project. First I explained to them why we had chosen to dam the Chagres River. Behind us, the river channel is about six miles to the ocean, and in heavy rain, water might rise thirty feet. Thirty feet! Every bridge put in has washed out. The French were so arrogant after completing the Suez that they wouldn’t budge from a plan to keep the canal at ocean level, thought they could come up the Chagres, but it was an enemy they couldn’t beat. What we did was genius, I tell you. Genius. We’re turning the Chagres into a lake, and that means nearly half the entire route from Atlantic to Pacific is on top of those waters. All we needed was an elevation of eighty-five feet to bring the ships to the lake. Mother Nature is doing most of the work for us, because we use the water from the dam to raise and lower the ships in the locks. In short, we’ve conquered the Chagres and turned it into a servant.”

  “Yes,” I said. I already knew all of this. I needed to be patient, to get the questions I really wanted answered. “Brilliant.”

  “Right here, those five congressman looked at the same view that you are seeing and had the gall to doubt our fine engineering. And not only that, but voice those doubts to the colonel himself.”

  “Yes?”

  “Understand,” MacDonald continued, “this is not a conventional dam. Do you see concrete?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Besides, who was I to knock him off his rhythm as an enthusiastic tour guide?

  “Not a lick of concrete,” MacDonald said. “The design of the dam was as brilliant as the reason for it. Below us, we began with two walls of big rocky fragments. Then with hydraulic dredges, we pumped silt from the river channel of the Chagres and filled those two walls. Silt! It doesn’t wash away, not with the protective rock walls. And it fills every pore, and the pressures of weight above it turn it into something more solid than stone. Where we stand is well above the final water level, and all that remains is to finish turning this into a hill and planting vegetation. A year from now, it will look like part of the landscape and not a drop of water will percolate through all the silt beneath it guarded by those rock walls.”

  That dirt to cap the hill was also being hauled in by train on temporary tracks. MacDonald oversaw about a thousand men.

  “So,” I said, “there was an explosion on one of those trains, and that slowed things down?”

  “Who is talking about a train?” MacDonald frowned. “Aren’t you listening? With the colonel himself standing where you are, one of those spindly congressmen pipes up and says sure enough this might be the biggest dam in the world, but compared to the lake it’s supposed to hold, how can something this small keep back such a tremendous amount of water? And the colonel—well, you probably know how he believes in letting a man be responsible for his own work—turns to me and says, ‘Mr. MacDonald, why don’t you explain?’ So there I am, with the honor of slapping those doubting Thomases with the facts of engineering. I mean, really, what did they think, that the colonel didn’t know what he was doing, choosing to make a lake that would do almost half of the canal’s work? And I told them, clear as day, that the pressure of a body of water is determined by its height, not its volume. That’s a hydrostatic law of engineering, not too difficult to understand, I would say.”

  “Of course.” I hoped MacDonald would get around to answering my question about the explosion when he was ready, so I played the role of a good listener. “Don’t tell me, then, that your answer wasn’t good enough.”

  “Not even near good enough! That congressman flat out told me that if he had a big enough foot to kick the dam, the more he had behind that kick, the more pressure he’d put on the dam, and how was he going to explain his votes for maintaining the canal budget when he couldn’t tell anyone back home he believed a dam this small could do the job? Right in front the colonel he said this. Right in front! But let me tell you, the colonel didn’t get to where he was because he suffers fools, not at all.”

  “Of course. Not at all.”

  “So the colonel just gives the man a smile and says, ‘Sir, if your theory is true, how could the dykes of Holland hold back the entire Atlantic Ocean?’ And just like that, in one sentence, the colonel paints the prettiest picture of the hydrostatic law that a man could hear. Those congressmen walked away happy as could be, and the colonel winks at me and slaps my back and then follows. He’s terrific, all right, the colonel is.”

  MacDonald paused. “You had a question about the explosion?”

  Finally. “Just following up, on the colonel’s behalf.”

  “Well, it knocked a car off the tracks, killed some silvers, is all. Nothing like that has happened since. What we decided was someone might have left a box of dynamite in the wrong place.”

  “Seen this man before?” I showed him a newspaper photo of Ezequiel Sandoval.

  “No, sir.”

  “This man?” I showed the newspaper photo of Raoul Amador and was rewarded by a flinch.

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s all.” I’d have to ask Miskimon a few questions about Mr. MacDonald. “Thank you. I can find my way back.”

  I walked past the work crews and the slow-moving cars filled with dirt. Colón was my next destination, but not, unfortunately, to finally take passage on a steamer.

  Not quite yet.

  Just after dawn, when I’d realized that the photographs showed a new constitution signed by a group of revolutionaries, I had been given the responsibility of all their lives. I couldn’t be certain this was the only set of photographs. I could be certain that Cromwell had an inkling of its existence and that he’d made sure many of those who’d signed it saw me pull out their newly designed flag, as if I were the investigator who’d discovered that flag.

  Given that Raoul Amador’s name and signature was the first among all the others, it now made sense why he had confronted me with a pistol and knife.

  But who had slipped those photographs into my laundered clothing, and why?

  Had I been wiser, I would have simply delivered the evidence to Goethals. He’d wanted to know who was hunting me and who was behind the sabotage. Those photographs had the full answer.

  Had I been wiser, I would not have continued with this charade of investigation, assuming that Goethals was keeping track of my movements in the way he kept track of every activity in the American Zone.


  The trouble was, among those fifteen whose signatures were tantamount to treason against the republic, fifteen people who would face execution, was the signature of a woman with whom I was utterly smitten.

  Raquel Sandoval.

  Harry Franck had described it correctly. Here too, stepping from the American Zone at the train stop of Cristóbal and into Colón and the Panamanian republic was a simple matter of crossing the street.

  Buildings behind me in Cristóbal were neatly framed, neatly painted, and well protected by mosquito screens at every window.

  Ahead of me, in Colón, was the flatland of a former swamp. My first time through on the Sunday morning of my arrival had only given me a view from the train. On the street, I could see that, unlike the crooked streets of the hillside of Panama City, Colón was laid out in grids of square blocks. The buildings were shrouded by vines, and the whitewash tinged with the brown of mold.

  Although I could have stayed in Cristóbal to be safe, I knew I hadn’t been followed, and since my route was parallel to the invisible border, I decided to walk through Colón. I passed a merry-go-round of giant wooden horses, where silver-dollar men, obviously drunk, clung to the necks of the horses and rode with the giddiness of children.

  Prostitutes wandered freely, as did beggars.

  I had missed all of this on the Sunday of my arrival, going straight from steamship to train. It seemed a gloomy city, but maybe that was more a reflection of my state of heart.

  I passed the boxcars that were used to house silver-dollar men, and after this sad detour, I turned back again to Cristóbal in the American Zone, where the new streets were wide and lined with mature palms, and the buildings were magnificent once more.

  Because I was curious whether Franck had been exaggerating, I took a moment to meander through the Washington Hotel, where Theodore Roosevelt had stayed during his visit to the canal a few years earlier. Franck was right about the sign at the pool, restricting the area to gold employees. I glanced at the men and women lounging on beach chairs and saw only skin that would turn pink with too much sun.