God's Favorite

by Lawrence Wright

  “You’ve heard the news, of course.”

  The Nuncio nodded. That very morning the city had been electrified by the report that Panama’s most famous revolutionary, Dr. Hugo Spadafora, had been murdered.

  “He was on his way to the capital to make charges against Noriega,” said Father Jorge. “Everybody knew that he had been promising to reveal the connections between the General and the narcotraffickers.”

  “Yes, I heard him on the radio last week. He said he had a briefcase full of evidence. What do you know about it?”

  “These remarks come to me privately, but they are not under seal,” Father Jorge said, betraying no emotion behind the shiny, round lenses. “Let us say they are observations of one who was intimate with a certain lieutenant.”

  The Nuncio had given his secretary permission to spend part of each week ministering to the poor in El Chorrillo, a vast slum in the center of town that surrounded the Panamanian military headquarters. He thought it might add to his protégé’s portfolio when the Holy See began looking for prospects. Happily, there was an unexpected dividend in this part-time assignment: many soldiers came to the Chorrillo parish to pray, as did their women—the wives and girlfriends and mistresses who were such invaluable sources of intelligence, especially for Father Jorge, whose dark good looks and scrupulous chastity made him a sought-after curiosity in female society.

  “As we know, Hugo left Costa Rica on Friday, the thirteenth,” Father Jorge continued. “He took a taxi across the border and had a serving of rabbit stew in a small cantina. Then he boarded a minibus for the capital. It appears that he got as far as Concepción. He was taken off the bus by a PDF officer and escorted to military headquarters. That is the last sighting of the living Hugo Spadafora. Three days later his headless corpse was discovered in a U.S. mailbag on the Costa Rican border.”

  “Unburied?”

  “Exactly, dumped on a riverbank, obviously meant to be found. By the way, I have secured the coroner’s report,” said Father Jorge, trying to suppress the note of triumph in his voice as he passed the photocopied document to the Nuncio, who eagerly snatched it up. “As you can see, he was quite extensively tortured.”

  “And raped, I see,” the Nuncio said as he examined the report, which was slightly damp from Father Jorge’s clothing.

  “Yes, apparently they severed his hamstrings so he couldn’t resist. And when they finished they drove a stake up his ass.”

  The Nuncio cast an uncritical but surprised look at his secretary, who never, in the Nuncio’s memory, had ventured anything like a vulgarity. The impassiveness of the young priest’s expression assured the Nuncio that he was merely speaking clinically, with his usual harrowing exactitude.

  “At the end, a PDF cook cut off his head,” Father Jorge added.

  “Are we to make anything of that?” asked the Nuncio.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The entire country is in love with witchcraft. No doubt they believe that there is some juju to be gotten from such practices.”

  “I think it’s just a show to terrify the masses.”

  “Perhaps,” said the Nuncio, “but before the drug money came to Panama, Noriega would never have stooped to this. This is not his style.” He reached for one of Sister Sarita’s sugar wafers and held it in front of him, as if it contained some vital mystery.

  “But as long as he is out of the country, he can maintain that he knew nothing about the assassination.”

  “I doubt that will help him.” The Nuncio placed the coroner’s report in a slender drawer in the center of his desk, which he locked with a key he kept in the pocket of his cassock. “The great Hugo Spadafora,” he said meditatively. “You know, this time I think the Little General has gone too far.”

  THREE FRIGHTENED men entered the driveway of a handsome villa in Fort Amador, a former American military base that had been turned over to the Panama Defense Forces. A high stone wall topped with shards of colored glass surrounded the grounds. As the car approached, the iron gate opened to receive it, then abruptly shut behind it with a clang of doom.

  The door chime played “Lara’s Song” from Doctor Zhivago. Presently a shirtless butler in Bermuda shorts opened the door. “Mr. Escobar is expecting you,” he said with pity in his voice.

  The three men—César Rodríguez, Floyd Carlton, and Kiki Pretelt—exchanged desperate glances, then followed the butler through the living room to the private office of Pablo Escobar, the chief of security for the Medellín cartel.

  The office was tasteful but surprisingly modest for a man of Escobar’s wealth and resources. House-decorating magazines covered the coffee table. The shelves were bookless, lined instead with eight-track tapes and exotic Oriental vases. The centerpiece of the room, Escobar’s desk, was an elegant sheet of black slate. A paused Pac-Man game blinked on the computer screen. Behind the desk was a picture window opening on a resplendent garden. Hummingbirds dodged frantically through the blossoms.

  Escobar was sitting on his Exercycle with a towel around his neck, watching CNN. He did not seem to notice the men when they came in. They stood nervously aside and listened to the reporter describing Panama as a drug haven and a sanctuary for internationally known mobsters, such as the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar. “Unlike many people here, Dr. Spadafora had the courage to speak out against the criminal element of Panamanian society,” the reporter continued. “His death could mean the end of popular resistance to the Noriega regime, but judging from the reaction to his death, it is only the beginning.”

  Escobar stopped pedaling.

  “What do you want to drink?” he asked. “Strychnine or cyanide?”

  Kiki collapsed, banging his head on the slate desk as he fell.

  “Get him off my rug,” Escobar ordered. “He’s bleeding on my fucking Karistan.”

  Floyd and César pulled Kiki to his feet. His eyes rolled slowly back into focus.

  “It was a joke,” said Escobar. “Ha, you should see your faces. You must have a very bad conscience to react in this manner.”

  Kiki tried to speak, but his lips seemed to be glued together.

  “Low blood sugar, Mr. Escobar,” said Floyd. “I think he missed breakfast.”

  Escobar gave them all a look of such disdain that Kiki began to wobble again. Floyd and César held him up.

  “The Bible says a man cannot serve two masters,” said Escobar, “but you work for me and you work for Noriega. The time has come to choose.”

  “Mr. Escobar, there is no choice. You know our first loyalty is to you,” said César as the others nodded.

  “ ‘Loyalty’—this is an interesting word,” Escobar said as he toweled off. He was a pudgy man with a frowning mustache. “Perhaps it means something different in Panama. In Colombia, when we pay a man for his cooperation, we get his cooperation. If he doesn’t wish to work with us—okay! He doesn’t take our money. But this! I give Noriega five million dollars. I entrust it to you. You tell me he appreciates it.”

  “He was very grateful. I am sure of this,” César said.

  “Yes, he even sends me this vase,” said Escobar, indicating a delicate blue ceramic, which resonated in a pleasing low hum as he traced his finger around its rim. “It’s Ming, you know, one of the finest pieces in my collection. Very rare, a genuine treasure.”

  “It’s exquisite,” Kiki said in a hoarse whisper.

  “This is true. He also rents me this villa, but he charges me so much I wonder if I can afford his generosity. Now I learn that he has closed down our new processing lab—a world-class facility, the finest I have ever seen, a work of great genius. Twenty-three of my workers captured—highly skilled men, men with families—taken off to jail. As if they had no protection. As if they had no assurance from me of their safety.”

  “This is wrong,” said César indignantly. “Most definitely a very wrong thing.”

  “Yes, it is. And now I want that you deliver a message to the General,” said Escobar, his face turnin
g black with fury. “You tell that little wart he’s going to die! Right here! I’ll rip out his balls! I’ll feed his liver to the house cat! Do you think he can understand that? This is business!” With that, Pablo Escobar hurled his prized Ming vase through the picture window, sending shards of glass into the hibiscus and scattering hummingbirds into the sky.

  DR. JÜRGEN SPRACHT, the world-famous Swiss dermatologist, carefully unwrapped the gauze from the face of one of his most difficult cases—M.N., as he was known in the medical literature, a middle-aged Latin man badly scarred by multiple lesions of acne vulgaris that continued to erupt long after adolescence. It was a challenging case, one that Spracht had been working on for nearly a dozen years with admittedly modest success.

  “Ja,” he said as the gauze lifted to reveal a raw red scab covering the patient’s entire face. “It’s clearing, it’s definitely clearing.”

  The patient started to smile, but the scab cracked like a boiled egg. M.N.’s eyes registered a bolt of pain.

  “Not moving ist best,” advised Dr. Spracht. “No expression. Even talking ist nicht so gut.”

  The patient grunted in response.

  “Now the nuss will apply special ointment, and we will bandage all over again. Agweed? No movement.”

  As a blond nurse in a gratifyingly tight lab coat leaned over and began to swab a stinging green unguent on the throbbing wound, ignoring the muzzled cries of pain, the door opened, and a very alarmed receptionist stuck her head in. “There’s an emergency call for General Noriega!” she announced.

  “I am busy,” the patient said through clenched teeth.

  “It’s the president of Panama,” the receptionist exclaimed in an awed voice.

  “Nicky, what the fuck do you want?” the patient asked as Dr. Spracht held the phone to his ear.

  On the other end of the line there was a brief transatlantic pause, then President Nicolás Ardito Barletta responded, “Tony, I have serious news. Something very important has come up. Incidentally, Roberto is also on the line.”

  “Hi, Tony!” said Roberto Díaz Herrera, the colonel who was second in command of the Panama Defense Forces.

  “What is the problem?” Tony demanded.

  “Hugo Spadafora has been murdered,” Barletta said in a strangely neutral tone of voice.

  “Good,” said Tony. “This is good.”

  “Uh, yes, of course we agree, but the people are not taking it so well,” Barletta continued. “I don’t know if you can hear the honking outside. I’m holding the phone out the window for you.”

  Tony listened to the cacophonous traffic outside the presidential palace and the distant chanting of his name.

  “There is great agitation,” Roberto added unhelpfully. “The people hold you responsible.”

  “Listen, Nicky, I can’t talk about this now,” said Tony. “You should call me in New York next week.”

  “Next week!” said Barletta.

  “Tony, what we’re saying is that the situation in Panama is very unstable,” said Roberto. “Maybe it is more important for you to be here than in Paris, or Switzerland, or New York, or whatever.”

  “We think either you should come home right away, or else . . .” Barletta’s voice trailed away significantly.

  OR ELSE?” The threat implicit in that phrase echoed in Tony’s mind as his limo crawled through the Geneva traffic. What did they think of him—that he would abdicate? Live the rest of his life in Switzerland? Who did they think they were dealing with? Did Nicky and Roberto imagine that they could run Panama without him? The thought would have made Tony laugh if the consequences weren’t so painful.

  His thoughts flew about in confusion. Hugo dead. Tony’s nemesis gone. Out of his life. Out of life itself. It should be an occasion to rejoice. It was certainly an opportunity to reflect on the nature of divine justice. Hugo had been everything Tony was not: tall, handsome, rich, loved. And now dead, a nothing, his fame turned to vaporous memory. Delicious victory, especially after the noise that Hugo had made about Tony and the narcos, the threats he had made on the radio, the “proof” he had boasted about having in that little book of his.

  But panic was banging on the door demanding to be admitted. Hugo—dead! Everyone would blame Tony for it. They already were! Something enormous had shifted in Tony’s universe, and only God knew how it would throw the planets out of alignment. A little change was containable. Too much change made everything crazy.

  But in any case, he had a more pressing concern impatiently awaiting for him at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Tony glanced at his watch and shuddered.

  Twenty minutes later, the limo came to a halt in front of BCCI’s imposing Geneva headquarters, and Tony darted out, carrying a weighty valise.

  “Four o’clock!”

  Tony periscoped his head toward the sound of that stonyhearted voice. There she was, sitting on a divan, surrounded by shopping bags and stroking the head of the dead fox attached to the fur around her shoulders: Felicidad, his formidable wife, staring at him with the eyes of an assassin.

  “You said to meet you here at four o’clock and you show up at ten to five!” Her voice echoed in the oddly rapt lobby.

  “Sweetness, the traffic—”

  Felicidad made a clucking, dismissive sound that caused Tony’s knees to go weak. “But I have arranged a surprise for you,” he pleaded. “This is something I am sure you will appreciate.”

  “I’ve got a massage at six.”

  “Please, dearest, this is most important to our future, I swear it.”

  “This had better be worth it.”

  A few minutes later Tony and Felicidad were seated in a small but luxurious conference room in the high-security subbasement, decorated with investment-quality folk art and hand-painted Haitian furniture.

  “Very tasteful,” Felicidad decreed as she surveyed the room. “We should do this, Tony. We should do this in the den.” She seemed to be mollified by the prospect of extensive redecoration.

  Tony nodded agreeably, although the thought of turning his den into a replica of a Swiss bank office filled him with—well, mixed feelings. On the one hand, how pathetic, how derivative, how frankly weird to come upon Caribbean handicrafts in this chilled subterranean Swiss vault; on the other hand, he had to admit, it looked better here, it looked like real art. A ghoulish frieze of skeletons tangoed on the painted tabletop. Life in death: it was so primitive, so unreconstructed, so strangely powerful now that Tony saw it out of context. Perhaps something in the cold Swiss soul longed for chaotic tropical vitality. Tony considered himself an expert on the Swiss, since he had been coming here annually for a decade now, both to do his banking and for the spa where Felicidad got massages and Tony received Dr. Spracht’s savage facial treatments–and also fetal-tissue injections that gave Tony a more or less continual erection. Of course, the Swiss claim they don’t deal in voodoo, but Tony recognized magic when he saw it. He would have to get the recipe for those injections.

  It occurred to him that there was a correspondence between his own radical Latin soul and the mountain-bound conservatism of these magical, cheese-eating blonds. Perhaps he should stay here after all, he reflected; life would not be so bad. Here, in frumpy Geneva, Tony could experience his own Swissness. He, too, had a longing for neutrality. He, too, yearned to step out of the arena of conflict, to achieve the spiritual contentment that seemed so native to the curtained horizons of Europe’s dairyland. He supposed it was mere cultural difference that allowed this bank, which had been established for the sole purpose of hiding drug profits from Colombia and stashing away large portions of the Third World GNP in numbered accounts, to appear so respectable, so within the bounds, so spiritually untroubled. “Pecunia non olet,” the bankers liked to say: money doesn’t smell.

  Presently the door opened and a nervous young teller appeared. Behind her was a bulky man in shirtsleeves and an apron who was pushing a heavy metal cart. The man in the apron took a quick glance at the General,
then cast his eyes into middle space as he pushed the cart into the conference room. Tony waited until the bankers were gone, then he opened the valise and dumped $13 million on the table.

  Felicidad looked at him with scorn. “Tony, did you think you could buy me off?”

  That, of course, was exactly what he had thought. He took a key from his pocket and opened the vault on top of the cart. There were stacks of currency inside, mounds of it—dollars, francs, yen, marks—and a dozen shining gold ingots. Tony lifted one of the gold bars and pressed it over his head like a dumbbell. “Heavy,” he said, noticing that the underside of the bar was stamped with a swastika.

  Felicidad drew the fox close around her shoulders despite the thin bead of perspiration that had formed on her upper lip.

  “Tony, what is this?”

  “Money. Lots and lots of money.” Tony casually began to stack the new currency into the vault.

  “But where did it come from?” Felicidad asked hesitantly. Her breath was shallow and faint.

  “Hard work. Investments. A few gifts. It’s retirement benefits, mainly.”

  “They could hang you for this.”

  “I didn’t steal it! People give me things—it’s part of my job to do favors, and in return, they give me little donations.”

  “Tony, this is a lot of favors.”

  “Many favors, many donations.”

  “I don’t want to know the details,” Felicidad said as she cautiously fanned through a bundle of thousand-yen notes. “And what do you expect from me, with all this?”

  “Understanding. Patience. Perhaps a little forgiveness. A man like me, I am not so perfect, but you must admit there are compensations. Take that into account, that is what I am saying.”

  “Even so, Tony, the power, all this money—it’s not infinite, you know.”

  “Not infinite, but isn’t it enough?”