Beneath a Panamanian Moon

by David Terrenoire

  “That in black-and-white?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t watch black-and-white. What about the scariest movie you ever saw?”

  I thought about that a minute. There was Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, and Sunset Boulevard. I said, “I don’t know, what about you?”

  “All the President’s Men,” he said, and gave me a sideways smile as if he’d been jerking me along. “So really, what do you like? I mean, if you could see any movie you wanted, what would it be?”

  There was no hesitation. “The Big Lebowski.”

  Zorro nearly drove off the road. “I love that movie.” He bounced the heel of his hand off the steering wheel, “Yeah!”

  We had found common ground. The Dude. I pulled my shirt away from my body and said, “Is it always this hot?”

  “Not at night. When it rains you can freeze your ass off.”

  “Does it rain much?”

  “Yeah. A lot.”

  “I read there was a rainy season.”

  “Uh-huh. But even in the dry season it rains every day. Once at one o’clock for about an hour, and again at nine.” Zorro pulled off the main road and onto a rutted dirt track that ran through the jungle, the vegetation so thick and so close that wet fronds whipped the sides of the Jeep, soaking me to the skin.

  “It’s the dry season now,” Zorro said. “Otherwise it’d be raining.”

  He twisted the wheel left and right, keeping expertly to the trail that was invisible beyond ten feet of the Jeep’s hood. Several times on tight turns, the Jeep went up on two wheels. “These old things flip,” Zorro said. “Kelly keeps promising to get us a Hummer.”

  It was dark under the green canopy and occasionally I saw a flat shadow skitter across the road.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Land crab. When they breed they cover the whole fucking highway. They’re useless as tits on a nun. Can’t drive over ’em ’cause they’ll pop the tires, and you sure can’t eat ’em.”

  “What do you do for the hotel?”

  “Security.”

  “Many guests?”

  He stared at me longer than was safe considering our speed. The Jeep went up on two wheels again, nearly pitching me into the brush. “Whoa,” Zorro said. “That was a rush.”

  “I play piano,” I said, after I’d pried my fingers from the dash.

  “I know,” he said. “You’ll be assigned to Cooper’s team. He’s another new guy. We’re short because of Rosebud.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard correctly over the engine and the sound of my own heart pounding in my ears. “Because of what?”

  “Rosebud,” he said. “He got eaten by an alligator. He was a friend of mine.”

  “I’d heard it was a shark.”

  “Alligator,” he said.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was a great guy but couldn’t play piano worth a shit.”

  I wondered if there was a cause-and-effect thing happening here, but I didn’t ask.

  Zorro drove with his knees while he lit another cigarette. “You any good?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  He laughed, but didn’t let me in on the joke.

  We approached the gates of La Boca and stopped at the guardhouse. A blond man, with shoulders you could screen IMAX on, ambled out and said, “This the new guy?”

  “This is him.”

  The guard, whose flowered shirt and khaki slacks softened the hard lines of his HK submachine gun, looked me up and down as if I were a new item on the menu and decided, “He doesn’t look so hard.”

  “You won’t say that when he drops a piano on your ass,” Zorro said, and then they both laughed.

  The guard looked at his watch, then at the sky. “Best get your butts inside. Flyover’s in three.”

  After we’d driven away I asked, “Who was that?”

  “Meat,” Zorro said.

  “Meat?”

  “Yeah. He’s the social director.”

  “What’d he mean by ‘flyover’?”

  “Satellite,” Zorro said, and drove quickly along a street lined with palm trees. Overhead, an iguana the length of my arm jumped from one tree to the next. On my right, beyond a hedge, I caught glimpses of whitecaps and waves, glittering as they curled toward a shallow beach. We passed a central garden of hibiscus, gardenia, and bougainvillea.

  We passed a tennis court. Men, tanned and dressed in blinding white, stopped playing and hurried into the shade of an open bar. Men on a putting green looked skyward and walked toward a shelter beneath the trees.

  “We stay in the hotel with the guests. Wait staff and groundskeepers have their own building up beyond the courtyard. The guests’ own security staff, the students, live in separate barracks not far from here.”

  “Students?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The bap of the Jeep’s engine startled a flock of parakeets and they exploded from a treetop. A spider monkey loped across the road and watched us as we parked in front of the hotel.

  This was the resort, a jungle hideaway built for the rich who, distracted by the demands of World War II, never came. It was a three-story monument to Deco extravagance with a high, wide veranda surrounding the first floor. I had seen this place before, but only from above.

  “Welcome home,” Zorro said. “Now get inside. We’ve got less than a minute.”

  “I will.”

  “See Ren. He’ll fix you up with some clean clothes until the fucking airline finds your fucking bag.”

  “Thanks.”

  Zorro looked at his watch again and said, “You want to be inside, new guy.”

  “Right.” I snatched my satchel out of the back as Zorro popped the clutch and pulled away, raising dust in the sun.

  I walked through the double screen doors and into the hotel lobby. No one was at the front desk, so I took a minute to look around. I checked, but there was no hotel register conveniently lying around for me to scan. The movies make this spy work seem easy. It’s not.

  Off to the side was the front office. I knocked.

  A small fluorescent lamp illuminated a man hunched over a computer keyboard, pecking out letters one finger at a time. Without looking up he said, “You know where the x is on this thing?”

  “Bottom row, to your left.”

  He looked, found it, and hit it with his forefinger, then checked the screen to make sure the x hadn’t been mislaid somewhere in the circuitry.

  He was another Latino, like Zorro, but rounder, with a boy’s face. His black hair was slicked back and he had a dime in one ear. His right ear. “Ren?”

  He looked up, irritated, but as soon as he saw me his face brightened. “Harper, my man.” Ren jumped up, we did the dap, fists and knuckles, just like he’d taught me, and then he hugged me, one armed, pulling me in close to his chest. “Dude, man, you looking good.”

  “You, too, Ren. So what’s up? Last I heard you were getting your ass shot at in Iraq.”

  “Yeah, the hajjis thought they had me up a tree, you know? Throwing rocks. But I got out of there, man, and one of my old-time bros got me this gig here where I don’t get shot at and I make a lot more money.”

  “What the hell are you doing behind a keyboard?” I said, pointing to the computer. Ren had a lot of skills, most of them criminal in any society not openly engaged in combat, but typing was not one of them.

  Ren shrugged. “They figure I can fuck up less in here.” Ren sat down again and said, “Let me finish up this letter, okay, and then I’ll show you where to bunk.”

  While Ren searched the keys, I wandered back into the lobby, past two dying palms, and heard the murmur of conversation. I looked into a dining room. A dozen guests sat at tables covered in white linen drinking icy drinks and grazing on cold meats and yellow fruits.

  Not unusual in any resort hotel, except that every guest was male and every male was a Latin man between thirty-five and fifty. Was this the secret? Was this w
hat caused the Washington intel community to ponder over satellite pictures and Panamanian autopsies?

  Was this a resort for middle-aged gay men?

  And then a cute waitress in a short white jacket and swirling black skirt came out of the kitchen and every eye was on her like a bird on a bug and I knew that these men were not gay. These men were in training. And from the testosterone that filled the air, so thick it threatened to warp the veneer off the Baldwin upright in the corner, these men had been in training for some time. It was like football camp or basic training or one of those corporate team-building getaways where bespectacled CFOs bare their male breasts and beat on drums in the firelight.

  I walked across the dining room, stopping conversation as I passed, and sat at the piano. I stretched my fingers, aware that every eye in the room was on me. I opened the keyboard, cleared my throat, and began to play “Someone to Watch Over Me,” in honor of the surveillance cameras. I was barely into the opening bars before Ren grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the lobby. There was no applause.

  “Dude. You must be crazy,” he said. “Don’t ever do that.”

  “I was hired to play the piano. There was a piano. I played.”

  “Yeah, right, but you don’t play if somebody is in there.” He dragged me into the office and took a deep breath to calm himself. “You do that again and they’ll kill you, man, and that would be bad because I don’t know any more piano players. Okay?”

  Back inside the office, Ren straightened the collar of my shirt and said, “Now, let’s get you in to see the Colonel. He’s waiting and he gets unhappy when he has to wait for anything, especially some piano-playing pendejo. And you want to keep the Colonel happy,” he said. “It’s good for everyone.”

  Ren pointed to one of two office doors behind him. I went through the little wooden gate in the railing and knocked on the door that read “COL. J. PEPE (USA-RET.), MANAGING DIRECTOR.”

  “Come in.”

  I opened the door to a small office paneled in polished rosewood, and everything was very neat, very precise, very right-angled, just as I expected it to be. The only sound was the shifting drone of the oscillating fan as it swept the room. The Colonel had his head down, concentrating on fitting tiny batteries into a new digital camera, its instruction sheet unfolded across the desktop. The Colonel’s gray hair was cut close and thinning near the crown. I wondered if he knew.

  I had read his file and knew about his commands, and how he had been denied promotion and forced into retirement when he shot a reporter.

  The Colonel didn’t look up, so I looked around the office. On the walls were dozens of photos, almost identical in composition. In each, the Colonel stood smiling, the center of attention in a small group of other smiling officers, some American, some Vietnamese, some Arab, some Latin. In every picture, it was the same stiff pose and the same stiff smile. Like a fashion model who has just one look, but that’s the look that gets work. Row after row, uniformed men smiling. A friendly bunch of officers saying, We could shoot you right now.

  I waited and I watched as he went back and forth, staring at the tiny print of the instructions and then back to his fumbling fingers.

  He had the West Point ring, like Snelling and Smith, and wore a white guayabera, starched, even in the heat. He looked to be in his fifties and tall, even sitting down. A Cuban Monte Cristo sat unlit in the ashtray, its end chewed ragged.

  I wondered how the Latino name came with the Anglo face. This guy looked as much like a “Pepe” as I looked like Little Richard.

  Without looking up, he said, “Is that how you report for duty, soldier?”

  I glanced around the office. He was talking to me. “No, sir,” I said, and saluted his thinning hair. “John Harper, civilian, reporting as ordered, Colonel Pepe, sir.”

  He rotated his face upward as if his head were powered by servos installed in his neck. “Peep,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “PEEP,” he said again. “PEEP.”

  I stared at him.

  “PEEP!” he repeated. “Not Peppy. Tell me, troop, do I look like a taco-bender to you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.” The Colonel went back to his camera and batteries, muttering, “Damn family comes over on the goddamn Mayflower and every goddamn asshole with a week’s worth of Spanish thinks I’m some kind of border-hopping wetback.” He looked up at me and said, “You’re our piano player, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me about your service.”

  “There’s not much to tell, sir. I enlisted when I was seventeen. Special Services, the USO—”

  “I know what Special Services is.”

  “Yes, sir. Anyway, I worked the Officers’ Club and staff functions.”

  “You’ve also spent time at Benning, Huachuca, Bragg. I see some time in New York with the Tenth Mountain—”

  “The division band, sir.”

  “—and there is this list of security clearances, hardly what you would expect for an entertainer.”

  “I’ve played for the president, sir. They like to clear people who play at the White House.”

  He gave me a smile so sharp I could have shaved with it. “Of course. I also saw that you earned some sort of commendation for valor.”

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t a big thing.”

  “Your superiors thought otherwise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His face scrunched up and he bobbled his head, pleased. “That’s good. First off, you need to know your way around a firearm.”

  “I’m a little rusty, sir.”

  “No problem. We’ll have one of our men give you a refresher.”

  “And my ability to play piano, sir?”

  “That’s for a party we’re throwing. Don’t worry, there’ll be a nice bonus for you.” The Colonel smiled again, lots of teeth. “A little surprise, if you will.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what we do here, son?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We provide a secure place for influential and well-connected people to relax, away from prying eyes, while we train their security people. Now, considering your résumé, and the fact that you come with high recommendations, I would assume you know something about security.”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  He gave me the big smile, like in the photos. “Do you consider yourself a badass, Harper?”

  “A badass? No, sir. But I did qualify as marksman in basic, sir.”

  He chuckled. “You ever hear of Colombia, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Honduras?”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve even played for the ambassador, sir.”

  “Outstanding.” The Colonel studied me, perhaps for the first time. After a long moment, where the only sounds were the shush of the ocean beyond his window, he said, “Oh, and you might want to keep in mind, son, that if you give us any reason to terminate your contract, we do not use lawyers.” He went back to his camera and said, “See Kelly. He’ll get you squared away.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t listen to anything Kelly says. He won’t like you, so get used to it. No appreciation of the finer things. Not a man of culture. He didn’t want me to hire you and he’d send you home if he was the boss.” The Colonel looked up and smiled. “But he isn’t the boss.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m the boss.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Colonel stopped smiling. He’d apparently used up his shine quota for the day.

  “Now, you’re excused. And close the door on your way out.”

  I went back to see Ren. “Thanks for warning me about his name.”

  “I like to get you off to a good start, you know. But don’t worry; he’s not the real boss. Now I’ll show you where to sleep, okay? Get your shit.”

  I followed him across the lobby and up the staircase to the second floor.

  “We got a cou
ple other new guys. One, Ramirez, is a Chicano like me. The other’s Anglo, like you. Most of the Latinos here are Cubans or PRs. Don’t get ’em mixed up, okay?”

  Ren still had that dime in his ear. “Okay.”

  “There’s a big difference. All Cubans want to do is kill communists and Democrats, which to them is the same thing. You could trust a Cuban with your sister. Serious, man, because they only get a hard-on for Fidel. But don’t take showers with the Ricans. They like the white boys.”

  “What about Chicanos?”

  “Hey, you can trust us with everything but your car, man.” Ren laughed and his teeth were perfect.

  We walked to the end of the corridor and up a smaller stairway that ran to the top floor. Here, Ren unlocked room 303, pushed open the door, and said, “This is your room. There’s a bathroom down the hall.”

  The air was hot enough to bake a ham.

  “It’s the low ceiling. Traps the heat,” Ren said. “You can open the window, but then the mosquitoes get in.”

  “What about screens?”

  “I’ll see if I can find one tomorrow.”

  “Are all the rooms like this?”

  “Just the third floor. For us peons, man. But you got a phone hookup here, so you can plug into the Internet, you know, for the porn.”

  “Dial-up? I have to use dial-up?”

  Ren shrugged. “Hey, it’s the third world.”

  “Where do the guests sleep?”

  “Second floor. The rooms there, man, are”—Ren smoothed the air with a gliding palm—“rico. And with the guests, the rule is, just so you understand, you never look directly at any of them. Never make eye contact. And you don’t say anything unless they ask you something. OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I got it.”

  “One more thing. Close the window when you leave your room, ’cause the Panamanians will climb up here and steal all your shit. You got anything nice you want to keep, we got a safe in the office. Fucking people steal your mother’s picture just for the frame, no lie.”

  “Where do the Panamanians sleep?”

  “In town.”

  “Have there ever been, like, regular guests staying here, ones that don’t mind being looked at?”

  Ren laughed. “Once, some English dude had a guidebook printed like a hundred fucking years ago. He tried to check in but the Colonel chased him away with a shotgun.”