by Lou Berney
“He no want to frisk you,” the middle mugger explained helpfully. “He no want to touch your butt.”
Ted, needless to say, didn’t want that either. His hopes rose, because it seemed that even though the short mugger’s Spanish flew fast and furious, the tall mugger refused to budge on his no-butt-touching policy. But then the short mugger suggested what seemed to be an alternative approach—Ted found this ominous—and the tall mugger shrugged.
“Take off your pants,” the middle mugger instructed Ted.
That’s when Ted decided to make a break for it. It seemed like sound reasoning at the time. They couldn’t really throw the knife at him, could they? No, as it turned out, but they could throw one of their almost-full beer cans. And this was the country, remember, that had produced superstar New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, the pitcher who’d led Ted to victory in his fantasy baseball league a few seasons ago. Ted had glanced back over his shoulder to see if they were going to throw the knife at him. At that instant the almost-full beer can nailed him, flush in the forehead. Ted staggered and almost ran into a wall. Beer flowed down his face and stung his eyes. Beer and, he realized, blood.
Ted would find out later it was just a small cut on his forehead. He didn’t even need stitches. But at the time he didn’t know that. And, more important, the muggers didn’t know it either. They flipped out when they saw the blood sheeting down his face and dripping off his chin. They gathered around Ted and showered him with nervous apologies, in both Spanish and English. The middle mugger put away the knife and, inexplicably, offered Ted a stick of gum. Ted, inexplicably, took it. Then the muggers bolted and disappeared in the night.
It was the best thing that had happened to Ted all day, getting hit in the head with that beer can. Which pretty much summed up the kind of a day he’d had.
He turned on the TV, then turned it off. It was driving him crazy, that he couldn’t finish his book. He was almost certain that things weren’t going to end well there on the hillside covered with the bloodsucking vine, but it was the how, not the what, that made a good book good.
He went downstairs. He had to pass the doors to the banquet hall. Ted dreaded a chance encounter with Frank the Facilitator or George Pirtle or, God help him, Nerlides. Luckily, though, the doors to the banquet hall were closed. From behind them came laughter and the muffled bass beat of bad eighties pop rock. Ted hurried over to the front desk. The clerk informed him that yes, he did know of a bookstore that sold books in the English language. And no, it was not far, the walk; the walk was not dangerous.
“You’re sure?” Ted asked.
“I am sure,” the clerk said, “yes.”
Ted didn’t have any money to buy another copy of the book about the bloodsucking jungle vine, but he’d already devised a workaround. He wouldn’t buy the book, he’d just stand there at the shelves and read the last three chapters. Ha!
He left the hotel in good spirits. As promised, the walk was not far and he encountered no danger along the way. The bookstore was a pleasant place, light and airy, with a small café that spilled out onto the sidewalk in front. The English-language section, next to the café, was a pretty good size. Ted searched the shelves for the book about the bloodsucking vine. He knew that it had to be here. It was an international bestseller; if it was sold in a hotel gift shop, then certainly—
It wasn’t here. He checked again. He checked the shelf above and below, in case a careless browser had misplaced the book. The author’s other novel was there, but Ted had already read that one. There were no fewer than six copies of that one.
Insult added to insult added to injury, Ted thought with a grimace, even though he knew now he was just feeling sorry for himself.
He turned to leave. And noticed, reading at one of the tables in the café, an attractive Panamanian woman. She had warm, intelligent brown eyes and hair that corkscrewed charmingly every which way. She had what must have been two dozen bracelets on each brown arm and was reading a book by Flannery O’Connor that had been translated into Spanish.
Ted remembered liking Flannery O’Connor, her stories, in college. He checked the stack of books at the woman’s elbow. There was the same book by Flannery O’Connor, but in English, and beneath it was—
Shit! The bloodsucking-vine novel he’d been searching for! In English!
Ted hesitated, then made his way over to the woman’s table. He hesitated again when she glanced up at him, but her intelligent brown eyes were so warm, so curious—what could it hurt to ask? Probably she’d just laugh, musically, when he explained his predicament; she’d be more than happy to let him borrow her book and quickly skim the last three chapters.
“Excuse me,” he said, “this is going to sound really crazy, but can I ask you a favor?”
The woman frowned. Her eyes no longer seemed so warm. She sighed, a great gust of annoyance.
“Fuck,” she said, “off.”
Ted, startled, took a step backward, bumped into a chair, and sat down without meaning to.
When she saw this, when she misinterpreted that he was not fucking off but doing just the opposite of that, she made a sound like a growl.
“I said fuck off,” the woman snarled. She scooped up her books, stood, and marched away to the checkout counter, her many bracelets clanking.
MARIANA’S LIFE THESE PAST FEW DAYS had been one giant pain in the ass after another.
There was work: her boss. Cornejo had been flitting in and out of the shop at odd hours for the last two days. “Top-secret business,” whatever that meant. What it meant was that she’d had to work late yesterday and missed lunch today.
There was the apartment: her landlord. He insisted that Mariana was violating the terms of her lease by allowing her sister to stay with her for a few weeks. In retaliation for this perceived violation, he refused to fix Mariana’s badly leaking refrigerator.
There was family: Mariana’s sister. Who had dropped from the blue sky a few days ago and just seemed to assume she could stay with Mariana as long as she wanted. An impression shared by their mother, father, grandmothers, and four brothers, all of whom—the brothers—had apartments and houses much less cramped and more suitable for a lazy, messy, irresponsible sister who had decided to just irresponsibly up and quit her very good job as a bookkeeper for no apparent or rational reason.
And now there was this.
Mariana looked around the hotel ballroom in despair. The American men were—Forgive me, Lord, she thought, but no other word will do—grotesque. Leering and preening, hairless and fat, most of them as old as her father. They murmured sly asides to one another. When they spotted a woman they liked, they moistened their lips greedily with small purple tongues.
Mariana realized, thirty seconds after she arrived at the function, that she’d been recruited to this event under the most blatantly false premises.
You should have known better, her mother would grunt if she ever found out about this.
Yes, Mariana admitted with a cringe, she should have known better. But she’d been bored with her life, with the men in it, with Latin men in general, and the Building Bridges website had been very sleekly, very professionally constructed. So why not? Mariana had thought. It was a lark, an excellent opportunity to practice her English. If anything more came from the afternoon function … well, then that was—she paused to remember an English colloquialism she enjoyed—that was gravy.
Two of the other women at her table were clearly prostitutes from Colón. The other was a beautiful but skeletal young Colombian girl who could not have been a day over sixteen and could barely speak Spanish. She ate the entire bowl of nuts on the table, then looked around for more.
Mariana slipped the young Colombian girl a ten-dollar bill and told her to run away as fast as she could. The girl just looked at her without comprehension. Mariana sighed and headed for the door.
“Where ya goin’, sweetness?” said a man whose hair transplant had gone badly awry. Mariana just shook her head an
d tried to step around him. He stepped in front of her again, then laughed and swiveled his hips to pretend they were dancing. Mariana waited, burning a hole through his sternum with her eyes, until the man lost interest and wandered away.
Her mother would never, ever find out about this. Mariana planned to take this afternoon to her grave. This afternoon and everything in it.
She left the hotel and walked to the new bookstore off Calle Uruguay, the one with the café. It was quiet there, as she’d hoped, the rustle of paper soothing, the smell of the coffee, the creak of the wooden floor. She picked out a few books to buy, then sat down to read. She’d begun finally to relax, to feel the cautious return of some peace to her mind, when the American approached.
“Excuse me,” he said. She looked up, alarmed. Had one of the Americans from the hotel followed her here? How? “I wonder if I could ask you a favor?”
The American had a small bandage on his forehead, a damp pink spot at its center. Mariana did not want to imagine what was beneath that bandage, or why.
Grotesque.
“Fuck off!” she told the bandage, and gathered up her books as quickly as she could.
TED, STUNNED, WATCHED THE WOMAN with the bracelets and the corkscrew hair storm off. And then, before he really realized what he was doing, he was on his feet, too, storming right after her.
He could feel his face flushing, the cut on his forehead throbbing. What am I doing? he thought, alarmed. He had no idea what he was doing! It was like he was having—it was like an out-of-body experience, except that he was very much in his body right now, too much so. His body was propelling him at great speed, without any input at all from Ted, toward the woman with the bracelets.
She was at the cash register, waiting for a cashier so she could pay for her books. When she saw him, the fierceness in her eyes should have scorched every bit of resolve from Ted’s soul. But, strangely, it didn’t. There shouldn’t have been any resolve there to start with.
“I swear to all that is holy,” she said, “if you do not leave me alone, I will have my four brothers—”
“Just one doggone second, please,” Ted said. More forcefully than he’d intended; he could tell this by the surprise on the woman’s face. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude, and probably it’s none of my business, but I just want you to know that I asked you one polite question, I’m actually a very polite person, and I’m actually one of those people who wish the world were a more polite and civil place in general, and I really debated coming over in the first place, because I didn’t want to bother you, I really wasn’t trying to ‘pick you up,’ but I did come over, which maybe was a mistake, but it’s not like I should get lethally injected because of it, and all you had to say, all you had to say was, you know, ‘Excuse me, I’m reading,’ and I would have said, word for word, ‘I’m very sorry I bothered you,’ and I would have left you alone, not another word, and you wouldn’t have had to have your four brothers do to me whatever you want to have them do to me, which—just let me say?—I’m really not that scared of, given everything that has happened to me the last few days, you don’t have the slightest idea.”
He went on to tell her, the words rushing out before he could even think about stopping them, about how his wallet had been stolen, how he’d been talked into this insanely stupid and demeaning Building Bridges tour in the first place, how no convention planner in his or her right mind would choose Oklahoma City over Kansas City or San Antonio, how he’d been held hostage in a cruddy restaurant and charged way too much for a cruddy meal and then mugged and hit on the head with an almost-full beer can, how he had no money, how the final three chapters of his bloodsucking-vine novel were missing, how that had been the absolute last straw, how he was sorry in advance if he offended her with what he was about to say, but he’d really grown to truly despise Panama. He almost told her about losing Vivian but just in time skidded to a stop at the edge of that cliff, heels digging in.
The woman was no longer staring at the bandage on his forehead.She seemed finally to be really looking at Ted. At his eyes, the rest of his face.
She seemed a little surprised by what she found there.
“What is this expression?” she asked. ‘ “Just one doggone second’?”
Ted had to take another big breath. He’d really worn himself out.
‘ “Doggone’ is like a kind of emphasis, I guess,” he said. “You can use it instead of a curse word.”
“You wanted to use a curse word instead?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I did.”
“But you were too polite?”
“I’m going to leave now,” Ted said. He felt drained; he felt sad and embarrassed; he just wanted to go home to a life he didn’t like very much anymore. “I’m very sorry I bothered you.”
He was startled when the woman laughed. It wasn’t musical—it was more like a nasally honk—but neither was it unkind.
“Don’t give up on Panama,” she said. “I think Panama has just been having a doggone bad day for everybody.”
Chapter 45
They woke up just after nine, which gave them twelve hours until they were supposed to meet Ziegler on Isla Taboga.
“Want to do some homework?” Shake asked Gina.
She nodded. “You read my mind.”
They left the foreskins in the hotel safe and chugged across to Isla Taboga in a beat-up little ferry that looked like it had been in business since colonial times. The Pacific was glass-flat but a darker shade of green-blue than the Caribbean up by Portobelo. Standing by the rail, breeze in his face, Shake had a feeling—without even dipping a toe in either one—that the water down here was colder.
There were only a few other people on the ferry. Shake asked about this, and a weathered old man told them Isla Taboga was mostly a weekend destination for day-trippers from Panama City. During the week, the old man said, the island slept. Shake—homework—made a note of this.
The ferry docked across from an abandoned hotel and a sandy beach. A cobbled footpath wound around a hill and up to the main square. Across from the whitewashed stone church, a few more weathered old men sat around playing chess. Flowers were everywhere—growing wild, spilling off the iron balconies of the old buildings that lined the square—hibiscus and oleander and crepe myrtle. The sunlight up here felt to Shake thick and golden, like syrup.
“Why do you think Ziegler picked this place?” Gina asked.
Shake shook his head. “No telling.”
He strolled over to the church where they were supposed to meet tonight and tried the door. It was locked. There was one small restaurant on the square. A waiter in a long white apron had begun setting the outdoor tables. A sign said the restaurant was open till ten.
Shake crossed to the other side of the square. From that vantage point, he could see the ferry chugging back across the bay to Panama City. A quarter turn around the island was a row of smaller wooden docks. A few small fishing boats bobbed in the water.
“Public but quiet,” Shake said. “Fishing boats we could hire to get back if we missed the ferry or if he tried something hinky on that end. Remote, but not so much so we’d get nervous. He had to know we’d come check it out.”
“Seems fine, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Shake said. That’s what worried him.
Gina strolled over to one of the chess games. As she studied the board, she rested a hand on the shoulder of the old man next to her. It was such a friendly, familiar, casual gesture. Shake doubted that Gina herself was aware she’d done it. He decided right then that if he hadn’t already been in danger of falling for this girl, he was now.
And that’s just what it was, wasn’t it? Danger.
He asked himself to be serious for a second. To be forty-two years old and not seventeen. Because what would life with a girl like Gina really be like?
She strolled back over.
“I want to learn chess,” she said.
“God help the world.”
<
br /> “Do you think he’ll try to screw us over?” Gina asked.
“Fifty-fifty.”
“He’s offering a lot more than the foreskins are worth.”
“A guy with his kind of money, eight million bucks is probably a rounding error. Why would he want to hassle with a double cross?”
“But his ego.”
“On the other hand. Yeah.” Finally, for the first time in the ten or fifteen minutes since they’d been here, one of the weathered old chess players moved one of his pieces. “And we know he likes to play games.”
“So?”
“So as long as we keep things public, I think we’ll be okay.” Shake didn’t mention the other thing that he thought might increase their chances, at least marginally, of being okay: the Glock 19 he’d lifted off Dikran, which Shake had hidden in the bottom of the leather day pack he was carrying. Gina had wanted to bring along towels and sunscreen in case the beach on Isla Taboga was any good.
A question raised itself: Why had Shake hidden the gun beneath the towels? Why hadn’t he told Gina about the gun? Why hadn’t he told her about his meeting with Lexy, the deal she had proposed?
That was three questions, he realized. He didn’t have an answer to any of them. At least no answers he wanted to admit to himself.
“I’m surprised,” he said casually, “that Ziegler hasn’t tried to cut a separate deal with one of us.”
“He can tell how much we like each other,” Gina said, not missing a beat. She never did. She bumped her shoulder affectionately against his. “Wanna get some lunch?”
IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER ONE, but they were the only customers at the restaurant on the square. The waiter in the apron brought them good, simple fried fish, corvina with the head still on, along with arroz con coco and a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer, Atlas, a local brew.
The drowsy, sun-baked plaza, the flowers everywhere. The smell of the flowers, the smell of the Pacific, which was different in subtle ways from the smell of the Caribbean. More citric, cleaner, rowdier. The food and the wine and Gina across from him.