by Tim Cahill
The walls of Cartagena are monuments to an officially sanctioned thievery that the culprits called glory. The English could steal from the Spanish for the glory of England. The Spanish could steal from the indigenous peoples of the Americas for the glory of Spain.
As in any large and successful criminal enterprise, greed expands and infects the entire chain of command. It is thought that many of the Spanish treasure ships that sunk on the way back to the Old World did so because they were dangerously overweighted with undeclared treasure that returning conquistadores had hoarded for themselves.
And, in Spain, there was a growing sense that not all of the gold and silver stolen in the New World was reaching its “proper owners.” Officials wanted records to trace the path of the treasure. Intense documentation of every phase of the plunder business was implemented. How much gold from the Inca mine? Fill out some documents and make copies for the viceroy, for the accountants in Seville. The captains of the ships that ferried the treasure up the west coast of the Americas filled out documents. Wherever gold and silver changed hands, there were documents to be filled out and signed and stamped and initialed and signed and stamped again.
Men whose duty it was to process these documents felt left out of the process. They had to stamp this or that piece of paper and watch an unimaginable fortune pass by under their noses, untouched.
Officials found that they could delay work on the newly required documents, they could “misplace” essential papers, they could cause no end of trouble. It became easier for those moving the treasure to simply pay for the documents. Everyone, all down the line, got a little bit of the take. Things went smoother that way. It was only fair.
And that, I thought, sitting under the walls of the fort as an interminable line of 1966 Chevys and hoochi-coo dancers passed by, is the reason that the simplest business procedures in Latin America must be built upon a mountain of paperwork. It’s a time-honored tradition.
Even today, public officials, customs officers for instance, are very poorly paid. On the other hand, everyone knows that they are entitled to a little bite of all business that passes their way: a kind of informal tax.
Whole villages can still be fed on the proceeds derived from one official document. In Latin America, every time a new official document is created, more families eat. No other area on the face of the earth is so dazed by documentation.
THE PARADE KILLED US. It was noon, and every official office would be closed until two. Jaime López groaned in despair: it had now become impossible.
Santiago dropped Garry and I at the hotel, where we said good-bye to Joe Skorupa who was flying back to New York. He said he’d check with Jane to see where we were and promised to meet us in Prudhoe Bay with a bottle of champagne. I said I didn’t know if we would make it to Alaska. Maybe I’d just stay in Cartagena and sign documents for the rest of my life. I could die happy then; hell would hold no terrors for me.
Santiago went off to get the brakes fixed. He figured the last three hours of the impossible paper chase would be frantic and thought he’d be able to drive faster through the growing tangle of traffic if he felt himself able to stop.
The brake job took until two-fifteen and Santiago was afflicted with a severe and perhaps irremediable case of Zippy’s when he picked us up. He tore through traffic, violated stop signs, and parked in the only available spaces, all of which were under clearly visible signs that read, NO PARKING. If there was a police officer present, all the better. Santiago would leap out of the car, throw his arms around the officer, hands would touch hands, they would laugh together for a moment, and then the officer would stand and watch our car until we had completed our business. Once, when the five of us came running out of a building, we saw one of these policemen waving away a tow truck.
Santiago, it seemed, had a lot of cousins in Cartagena.
We got the very last document we needed, the bill of lading from the shipping agency, at exactly 4:59. Jaime López didn’t care about the Pan-American Highway: he thought we had set an unbreakable record on this very day.
THE STELLA LYKES was a Constellation Class cargo carrier, 665 feet long with a 75-foot beam. A steam turbine engine generated fifteen thousand horsepower from a single four-bladed screw. Registered in the United States, the ship has a normal cruising range of twenty thousand nautical miles and is manned by a crew of thirty-six. She cruises at a maximum of twenty-eight miles an hour and uses $200 worth of fuel per mile.
There were accommodations for eight passengers in four double cabins. Passengers on board for the duration pay $3,000 per person for a voyage of approximately thirty-five days with stops at Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura: working ports. There are two Panama Canal transits.
Garry and I shared a stateroom which was set amidships and might have been a room in a motel called the Economy Eight Travel Rhode Inn. There were four such staterooms, but we were the only passengers. Across the hall was a huge lounge with three couches, two card tables, a coffee table, a TV, a VCR, and a small galley.
We had said good-bye to Santiago and Luis only a few minutes before, and it had been a surprisingly emotional scene. They had come up to the stateroom, and when we were safely ensconced in the lap of economy, there was nothing left to do but say good-bye. Garry took Santiago’s hand: the two of them looked each other in the eye, and then it was time for the big Latin embrace. Everybody hugged everybody, and we all did it again, on the deck, as Luis and Santiago were leaving.
“Those guys,” Garry said, “were pros.”
When had we ever even talked to them? Once, over coffee, on the road. A little bit in the Chevy as we were assembling War and Peace. I suppose Garry and I were impressed with the way Santiago and Luis carried themselves, their confidence and skill.
“We put our lives in their hands,” I said.
“Sometimes, on those blind curves, all I could see was Santiago’s hand, circling or patting the dog,” Garry said. “I put our lives in Santiago’s hand. His left hand.”
“And they were beat. Did you notice that? Big circles under their eyes, running around half roto.”
“I think they figured we’d been driving like that from Tierra del Fuego and would keep doing it on to Alaska. There was some mutual respect going on.”
“And then Luis grabs your arm,” Garry said. He imitated Luis’s voice: “ ‘Teem, don’t get off the boat.’ ”
These two pros had gotten us on the Stella Lykes after three days of hectic mayhem and didn’t think it would be a good idea for us to go into town for any reason whatsoever. Something could happen: a fight, an arrest, a misunderstanding. No, it was safer to stay on the Stella Lykes.
“I think,” Garry said, “I was sadder saying good-bye to those two guys than I was when I said good-bye to Jane and the girls. Because I knew I was going to see my family at the end of the trip. I don’t know when or if I’ll ever see Santiago and Luis again.”
We sat for a while on our respective beds.
“Good guys,” Garry said.
Time went by.
“This is strange,” I said.
“The boat is supposed to set sail early this morning.”
The whole day had been a hundred-yard dash, a frustrating, exhilarating race. Now we had nothing to do. Nothing at all. Run as fast as you can for a hundred yards but don’t cross the finish line. That’s what it felt like.
“Teem,” Garry said, “don’t get off the boat.”
WE WENT DOWN four flights of stairs to the officers’ mess in the Stella Lykes. Stacked near the door were compressed air tanks, very tightly secured, and above them was a big sign informing passersby that such tanks can fall over and that compressed air can escape through a hole the size of a pencil, which would cause the heavy tanks to rocket around and ricochet off the walls and kill people.
We had a good diner-quality U.S. meal, nothing gourmet, and our waiter was a man who looked like the entire front line of the Washington Redskins. We were tempted to call him “sir”
rather than “waiter” but mustered up the courage to ask if there was any liquor available.
The front line of the Washington Redskins approached another gentleman, a tall black fellow with a way of standing that suggested his bones had a great deal of elasticity to them. The front line said: “These boys ain’t had a taste for some time.”
The rubber man—his name was Frank—told us to go up to our stateroom, and he arrived a short time later with a bottle of vodka and a bucket of ice. It was his own personal bottle but he wouldn’t allow us to tip him. “Worth about, I suppose, eight bucks,” he said.
A few drinks later, Captain Juergen Steinebach, the head of the stevedore company, stopped in for a visit. He was a burly man who had been around the world and done some rally driving. He had heard about our project and knew we would be concerned about our vehicle. He wanted to talk about what we were doing.
I said that the record run had two aspects: driving and documentation. The captain had worked in ports all over the world and agreed with me that the countries of Latin America had produced the most document-intensive set of cultures on the face of the earth.
It was now after midnight. The longshoremen were supposed to stop working at one-thirty. The captain took us for a stroll down the pier. We walked past a ship called the Encouragement and Captain Steinebach said that there was more to a cargo ship than one that will carry a lot of weight at good speed. He was most interested in the loading gear. “A cargo ship,” he said, “becomes obsolete not because of her hull or engine, but because of her capacity to load and unload quickly.”
The night was hot, the air heavy with humidity, and the pier was still wet with the morning’s rain. Light from working ships fell across the damp pavement in sheets and patches. All else was darkness. It occurred to me that here, in a major Colombian port, there was a possibility that persons currently pursuing a career in international crime might be hard at work, and that such individuals could resent an accidental intrusion.
Still, we needed to be sure that the truck was loaded onto the Stella Lykes. In the utter darkness behind warehouse number 7 was the large rust-colored container that carried our truck. The longshoremen loaded it onto a towing trailer, hooked the Stella Lykes’s crane into it with a spreader device (most of the other containers were twenty-footers) and loaded it atop the other four forty-foot containers on the port bow.
We went back to the stateroom and tried to sleep. I was up three hours later. We were on that kind of schedule. I went into the lounge, then wandered back to the room where I lay in bed, on my back, staring up into the darkness. All Zipped up and nowhere to go.
THERE WERE SOME BOOKS in the lounge. One was about a man who killed people and kept a diary detailing his foul deeds. His wife found the diary. There was a confrontation and the wife was in jeopardy for some time but the bad guy got his in the end. I read the book while lying in the sun on a lawn chair on the gray metal deck in a deep canyon formed by towering stacks of rusty-orange containers.
It was an absolutely clear day. The water was a brilliant deep-water blue and there wasn’t a whitecap in sight. We had a 260-mile voyage to the Panama Canal and Panama City. To the west, I could see a bit of the jungle: the roadless Darien Gap.
The Panamanians say that completing the road would be difficult: there are a lot of bridges to build, a lot of grading to be done. The official explanation for the eighty miles of roadless wilderness is that South American cattle have hoof-and-mouth disease. A road would allow infected cattle to wander into Panama and introduce the disease to Central America. (Which is why Roberto Raffo, the Argentine who was organizing the horseback traverse of the Americas, was having such a hard time getting permission for the trip into Panama.)
There are other reasons for the gap. On my previous visits to Panama, I had the distinct impression that Panamanians hate and fear Colombians on the basis of the sort of news that I had in my clip file. Why build a road for the convenience of paid assassins? That seemed to be the attitude.
Finally, everyone everywhere agreed that General Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman, was involved in the drug trade. Specifically, it was alleged that he allowed traffickers to land and refuel planes in Panama in return for a percentage of the profits. Given a road from Colombia through Panama, Colombian freelancers could simply drive through the general’s territory, thus depriving him of a major source of income.
So the gap was there because the Panamanian people didn’t want a road. General Noriega didn’t want a road.
I made the mistake of finishing the book in about an hour. Why was I speed-reading? Now what was I going to do?
There was a momentary shadow, a patter of rain, then it was clear again. The sun touched the clouds on the horizon and they burst into flame, burned out spectacularly, then darkened down into the color of a deep bruise. Below these damaged clouds there was the occasional flash and streak of lightning. Then it was dark.
ABOUT TWO the next afternoon, we were in Gatún Lake, the huge artificial lake in the center of Panama, eighty-five feet above sea level. We had passed through the first set of locks, Gatún Locks, and had risen into the lake at two in the morning. The water was greenish and there were strange circular islands, tufts of tangled emerald jungle that dotted the lake. The islands generated a slight misting fog that rose out of the greenery in drifting silver pillars.
The large freighter was hugging a meandering curve of red buoys, carving a wide sinuous wake around the jewel-like islands.
The Stella Lykes passed close to the southern shore and I could see areas where the waters of the lake had eroded the banks. The land was the deep red of jungle clay. Creeks that emptied out into the lake flowed red: the color of diluted blood or bad catsup. There was something feverish and malarial about the color of these sluggish rivers against the impossible greenery of the jungle and the more muted palette of the lake.
The channel winds twenty-four miles through Gatún Lake before it enters the Gaillard Cut, an eight-mile-long canyon blasted through the rock of the continental divide. In places, the freighter seemed a stone’s throw from shore and the land looked vaguely prehistoric with ferny grasses and large-leafed plants. Frank, the rubber man, said that before the cut was widened, about twenty-five years ago, a man on the deck of a ship had to duck overhanging branches.
“Snakes on those branches,” Frank said.
The jungle seemed to close in on the ship, and the odor of the land, rather than the sea, freshened the air. Birdcalls burst out of the jungle with increasing urgency just at dusk: the whistles and melodic songs of jungle life and not the shriek of seabirds.
The last set of locks—Pedro Miguel, a thirty-one-foot drop, and Miraflores, a fifty-four-foot drop in two steps—would lower the Stella Lykes back to sea level. Lines connected to four small locomotives pulled us into the narrow lock. The engines were called mules.
“They used to really use mules,” Frank said.
Beside us, a large cargo ship, painted bright-yellow, was rising in the adjacent lock as we sank. The lights of the lock complex, set on high poles, were blinding, and the night seemed exceptionally dark behind them.
“Ought to be tying up in Panama City in a couple of hours,” Frank said.
At nine that evening, the Stella Lykes was in port. Longshoremen began working immediately, and we waited for them to off-load the truck. Frank, who hadn’t been around for some time, emerged from the crew’s quarters wearing an iridescent gold suit, gold boots, and a wide-brimmed gold hat. He carried a polished wooden walking stick with a gold handle. On board, Frank was a man who wore T-shirts and faded jeans.
“You boys ought to come along,” Frank said.
“We need to be sure they off-load the truck.”
“Be a shame,” Frank said, “to miss the flatback factory here.”
“Next time, buddy.”
An hour later the container carrying the truck was unloaded and trucked over to a large customs shed. Garry and I stood on the pier, s
haking hands, and I assured him that nothing could go wrong now. We could clear customs in a couple of hours tomorrow, head north, and have the record in our pocket inside of two weeks. About that time, Frank appeared out of the darkness, flanked by two Panamanian policemen. He seemed to be under arrest.
“Forget my shore pass,” he explained.
We followed him back onto the Stella Lykes. “Maybe you boys want to go into the lounge, have a drink,” Frank said.
“We’re driving tomorrow,” Garry said.
Frank shook his head: negative on that.
“What?” I asked.
“See, you boys shoulda come with me. I met this girl. She was a master of tongue fu.”
“Frank, what are you saying about driving tomorrow?”
“I’m saying you ain’t gonna be doing any. This girl, she could …”
“Frank!”
“Well,” Frank said, “it seems that, uh, tomorrow is, well, it’s a national holiday here. National Revolution Day. They tell me customs don’t work for sure, not on National Revolution Day.”
NATIONAL REVOLUTION DAY, I suppose, is an occasion of great merrymaking in Panama. I can tell you that customs officers do not work on National Revolution Day.
We were staying in a hotel in Panama City, just off a major road flanked almost entirely by bank buildings, twenty and thirty stories high. Swiss bank. Bank of this country, bank of that. In the distance, down the empty streets, I could see a pair of golden arches. It could have been a street in any major North American city—indeed, the official currency in Panama is the U.S. dollar—but everything was closed and there was no one on the streets. It was like an Ingmar Bergman film, with ceiling fans.