She shook her head. “More like the unusual. Have you ever heard of Jimmy Eat World?”
I laughed. “No. And you made that up.”
She crossed her heart. “I didn’t.” She watched my hands. “You have such a nice touch. Will you play something?”
“Sure.” I moved to the center of the bench and began to play one of my favorites.
“That’s pretty. What’s it called?”
“‘Our Love Is Here to Stay.’” I particularly like the lyrics. I sang a line for her.
“Nice,” she said, “but you don’t really believe that stuff.”
“I do,” I said. “I believe in love so right that it lasts a lifetime. I believe that each one of us is only half to a whole and that it’s our mission on earth to recognize our other half when we meet them.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. And if I didn’t believe that, I’d walk into the ocean right now.”
“A Star Is Born,” she said.
“A classic,” I said. “The James Mason version is my favorite. You like movies?”
“I love movies.” Kris perked up and said, “Hey, there’s an art house in the city.” She looked at her watch. “If we hurry, we might be able to catch something good. Last week it was Double Indemnity.”
“You forgot your hat,” I said, repeating a line that Barbara Stanwyck uses on Fred MacMurray.
Kris clapped her hands. “God! That was such a great scene, and she’s standing there in the doorway and you can see she doesn’t have his hat.”
“And he says, ‘Just put it on the chair.’”
“Yes! That was so good! So sexy.” She laughed, and the way her hair moved in the moonlight made my heart stop. “So, you up for a movie?”
“I don’t know. I was just going into town to get something to eat.”
“You missed the last bus,” she said. “But I have a car. We can see a movie and get a bite together, what do you say? Come on, I haven’t been away from here since before Christmas.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s off picking up more guests.”
“Don’t these people do anything but lie in the sun all day?”
Kris shrugged. “They go to the casinos at night, but they’re just waiting for the big blowout on New Year’s Eve. That’s what they’re all waiting for.” She played a C-major chord, followed by a G. “Are you all right? You look a bit flushed.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine.”
“Good. I saw you on the beach today with that girl.”
I laughed. “I saw you, too. Everybody saw you. I thought the guests were going to drool all over their Financial Times.”
“I hope you got some good pictures.” Before I could dissect her tone, timing, posture, and expression for any ominous undertone, she said, “I know this terrific place for sushi. I just have to get my keys.”
I let her lead me up the stairs to the second floor. She opened the door to a suite of rooms, all with a beautiful view of the courtyard and the water beyond.
“So, you live here with your father?”
“Yeah.”
“How long are you staying?”
“I have to go back to school in a few days.”
“That’s the most depressing news I’ve heard since I got here.”
She said, casually, “You looked like you were having a pretty good time with that girl.”
“Sometimes you have to make your own fun.”
She did me the huge favor of laughing, and it made me want to make her laugh again. Her skin glowed and I watched as she moved around the room, plunging into and out of the shadows.
“I can’t find the fucking keys,” she said. “Shit.”
She disappeared into an adjoining room and I idly looked around the place. Her suite was so different from my third-floor monk’s cell. The ceilings were fourteen feet above cool tile and the windows opened onto a wide balcony. The air hummed with air conditioned air.
I moved about the room, but like most hotel rooms, there weren’t many personal items that might tell me more about her. I spotted a photo and a book on an end table. The child in the photo sat in the lap of a weary but attractive woman in her thirties. The child looked like Kris. The woman looked tired. But she had managed a tight-lipped smile for the photographer.
I turned the book over and read the title: A Peace to End All Peace.
I heard the jingle of keys and looked up. “I found ’em,” Kris said. “Let’s go.”
I held up the book. “Is this yours?”
“Daddy’s, but I just started reading it.”
“You know your father hates me.”
Kris rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he doesn’t. He’s a little aloof, that’s all.” She grasped my hand and pulled me toward the door. “Now let’s go or we’ll miss the beginning of the movie.”
I followed her out to the parking lot. Kris owned a VW Beetle, an old convertible, its top held together by duct tape, its body held together by rust. The paint had faded into a dusty blue and the seats were a goat buffet.
The guard stopped us at the gate.
“Hi, Meat,” Kris said. “If Daddy’s looking for me, tell him I went to a movie.”
Meat stared at me the way a Persian-rug collector might eye an incontinent dog. “With him?” Meat’s lip curled back from bright white canines.
“Yeah, with him,” she said. “You got a problem with that?”
Meat’s shoulders bunched and I could see the muscles in his jaw work. “No, Kris, no problem.” And we all knew that there was a big problem and for some reason I figured it would be my problem as soon as Meat and I were alone.
Kris drove through the city like Bonnie Parker outrunning the law. She made quick, unannounced turns and fast sprints between lights. We pulled up across the street from El Leo, a magnificent old theater built in a time when theaters were rightfully called palaces. The marquee was ringed in neon, its name a proud shout into the street in six-foot-high, electrified letters. The movie playing was Casablanca.
Kris bought my ticket. “You’re my date, remember?” She let me buy the popcorn.
I liked Casablanca but I sympathized more with Sam, a piano player caught between two unreasonable people, than I did Bogart. I loved Sam’s opening number, “Shine,” but the lyrics were politically incorrect and I was far too white to sing them anywhere but in the shower.
This was my first time seeing Casablanca on the big screen, dubbed from English into Spanish with English subtitles. The actor who dubbed Bogart’s voice tried to sound like Bogey, but succeeded in sounding more like the older Bacall. Ingrid Bergman’s voice was a Latina Betty Boop, high on helium. But still, when Rick gave up the girl, I looked at Kris and saw the reflected black-and-white flickering across her eyes and in her face I saw the loss, the sacrifice, and the heartbreak laid bare, completely stripped of my generation’s new-century cynicism.
Watching Kris’s face in that flickering theater made me feel, for the first time, the sadness and nobility of that moment when the plane engines cough, the propellers begin to spin, and Bogart puts Ingrid Bergman on that plane with her husband, Paul Henreid.
The lights came up and Kris dabbed her eyes with her sleeve and I fell in love. It wasn’t intentional.
After the movie, we climbed back into the VW and zipped across town, racing the chiva buses and taxicabs from one intersection to the next. The city speed was forty-five and everyone ignored it, especially Kris, and the traffic rushed along, bumper-to-bumper, at sixty.
“I’m taking you to this place that makes screwdrivers with fresh-squeezed orange juice,” she hollered. “They’ve also got the best raw bar in Central America.”
“I’m completely in your hands,” I said.
She flashed a smile as she ran a yellow light and said, “You wish.” Then we shot up a wide boulevard, dodging buses and scattering pedestrians like geese.
Kris took me to a dark bar in a fine hotel where the
bartender spoke English, Japanese, French, German, and Italian. “The Chinese are very interested in Panama,” he said, “so I’ve been working on my Mandarin, just in case.” I made a note of it.
Kris sat close to me, her thigh pressing against mine. Her hair smelled like honeysuckle and popcorn and her breath was fragrant with fresh orange.
We talked about movies and music and mothers. We had lost our mothers, both of us, when we were young.
“I was fourteen,” Kris said. “There was an accident.”
“I was twelve.”
Kris tied her swizzle stick into a knot. “Other people don’t get it, do they?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they do.”
“How lost you feel.”
“And how guilty.”
“Right, like it wouldn’t have happened if you’d been smarter or prettier.”
“Or someone else.”
We ordered another drink and the multilingual bartender ran the oranges, each one as big as a softball, through the juicer.
Kris told me about the University of Richmond, where she was a senior, and said, “This is the fifth school I’ve attended. I keep changing my major. And I probably won’t graduate from there, either.”
“Why not? How many credits can you have left?”
“Just six, but, I don’t know…” Kris wrapped her hands around her drink and said, “I don’t really fit in there. A lot of rich kids with expensive cars. They think it’s cool that I’ve lived all over the world.”
“And you don’t?”
“You should know; army posts are the opposite of cool.”
The bartender announced last call, in English. We had one more and then walked back to the car. The streets were nearly empty and the smell of garbage and low tide carried on the breeze. I held the driver’s door open for Kris and she slipped behind the wheel. “I like you,” she said.
“I like you, too,” I said, carefully stepping around the emotional land mine.
“You’re like this weirdly hip choirboy. You give off the strangest vibes, like you have this big secret you can’t ever tell anyone.”
I laughed and looked at the clouds skimming high above the halo of city light.
“Well, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Have a secret you can’t tell?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you tell me?”
I looked at her face. It was open and trusting, eager for me to reveal something about myself that others could never know. “A musician never reveals his secrets.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s a magician.”
“We belong to the same union.”
“Here I thought we were having a moment.” She turned to start the car and I stopped her and I kissed her, and her lips parted and she kissed me back. When we broke, she said, “You’re still an asshole.”
“I’ve been told that before.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. The fact that you have secrets, I mean. It’s kind of sexy,” she said. “Like a man of mystery.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s me.”
We listened to a Panamanian station play Latin music all the way home. The nine P.M. rains had swept through, leaving a clear sky, and as we got away from the city, the Milky Way appeared directly above us, a white streak stretched across the universe. When we pulled up to the gate, Meat had apparently gone to bed to dream of stomping me into the mud and Hamster waved us through.
I walked Kris to her door and we kissed good night, and she promised to see me tomorrow and I said it was tomorrow already and she laughed and started to ease the door closed on a whispered good-bye.
The door stopped before it latched. When it opened again, Mr. Kelly was standing behind his daughter, his hand squeezing her forearm. His grasp was so tight that his fingertips were white.
“Do you know what time it is, Mr. Harper?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
He said to Kris, disgust like a fungus fuzzing his words, “Get to bed.” He let her go and I could see tears in Kris’s eyes, whether from pain or embarrassment I didn’t know.
Kelly stepped out and closed the door. We were alone. He loomed over me, his jaw clenched as if he were trying to crack a nut between his molars. “Did anyone give you permission to leave the hotel with my daughter?”
“No, sir.” The alcohol I’d had, and the way he’d handled Kris made me careless. I stepped into him, my face in his, and said, “But I thought my virtue was safe accepting her invitation.”
Kelly stiffened, not expecting me to stand up to him there, trapped in the hallway. “I don’t ever want you speaking to my daughter again. Do you understand me?”
“I think she can choose her own friends,” I said. I’m stupid that way because, of course, he hit me. I should have seen it coming, but I was standing so close, and the old man’s hands were so quick, that his fist was on its way before I could even blink. Then I was on the floor, looking up at him through a bright light of pain.
“Get out of my sight,” Kelly growled, and I did. On all fours, more humiliated than hurt.
I tossed and turned on my single bed. Finally, the adrenaline and shame of being knocked down made me get up, take apart my sunglasses, retrieve my picks, and do what I should have done the night before. I broke into Kelly’s office.
It was nothing. No one had bothered to change the lock since the hotel was built and a child could have opened the office door with skills picked up from Scooby-Doo. The file cabinets were harder, but yielded. Pop, and I was in. When I looked through the files, I saw why the security was so casual: There was absolutely nothing of interest. Everything was as boring as the hotel laundry list. I know because I read the hotel laundry list.
So I left a high-gain listening device attached to the underside of Kelly’s desk. I made sure the outer office was clear and moved through the dark to the Colonel’s door.
This door was dead-bolted, which gave me hope and about sixty seconds of difficulty. The files inside were locked by a steel bar that ran through metal hasps and was secured, top and bottom, with combination locks. I didn’t even try. They were way beyond my skill level.
The computer, like the one in Kelly’s office, would glow too brightly and attract moths and armed men to the windows, so I let it sleep, knowing I’d be stymied by the password anyway. I’m always disgusted when a movie geek types away for a few seconds, machine-gun quick, and then announces, “I’m in.” Yeah, right.
For the Colonel I left my best device, a crystal-controlled telephone transmitter the size of a matchbook. It runs on a single AA battery that will last for two weeks, which I hoped was thirteen days longer than I’d need. That transmitter would pick up both ends of a phone conversation and all conversations in the room. I love technology.
As I was locking up the Colonel’s office, headlights swept the lobby. After I was sure I hadn’t soiled myself, I crept through the dark dining room, eased out of the rear door and out onto the patio. I found a spot behind a potted gardenia for cover, just above the side entrance. Below me, a three-quarter-ton truck, its bed covered in canvas, pulled up to the drive, cut its headlights, and two men got out.
One man was the Colonel. He was talking to the other man. “We’ll get air cover,” he was saying, “but the ground initiative is ours.”
“The men will do their duty,” the other man said. “It is an honor to be chosen to right the wrong of a hundred years.”
The new guest’s face sported a horizontal white strip across the bridge of his nose. He paused, lit a cigarette, and in the firelight I recognized him as the Gorilla I’d swatted with the hardback on Christmas Eve. He was one of the men the Major had sent to skewer me for talking to Mariposa, and he was a man I’d traveled nearly a thousand miles to avoid.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The chapel was a six-pew, white-steepled church that looked as though it had been helicoptered whole out of the Virginia hills and dropped into the rain forest with all i
ts hymnals intact. The Colonel bullied a dozen waiters, landscapers, and busboys into carrying the piano out onto the patio, loading it into the three-quarter-ton truck, and then wrestling it through the narrow chapel doors. In the process, the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Virgin Mother were invoked often enough to fill a month of Sundays.
The piano took a few discordant knocks but its soul seemed to be in good shape as I chunked out a few left-hand triads. I stuck to solid majors, minors, and sevenths, no jazz extensions and certainly none of those flatted blue notes that would make the miracle of the wine sound more like last call.
I worried about meeting the Gorilla in the pews but soon realized that all of the Latino guests were either worshiping their inner eyelids from the horizontal prayer position, or had driven into town for mass with the locals. The only people in chapel this morning were Kelly, the Colonel, the Anglo trainers, and Kris, whose shoulders, as revealed by a pale blue sundress, reminded me that there was indeed a kind and generous Creator.
Meat even wore a tie around his keg-sized neck.
I struggled through “A Soldier of the Cross,” “At Anchor Laid,” “Remote from Home,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” and several other martial tunes before the Colonel stepped to the pulpit and talked for an hour about God’s army and how we should smite our enemies in His name. Kris sent me holy messages with her eyes while her father gave me looks of damnation and I felt chastised as a sinner, and risen as the redeemed, all in one service. We closed with “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” The hymn didn’t say whether those arms were supplied by Colt or Smith & Wesson.
The rest of the afternoon passed like any other day with the guests lazing about the beach, knocking long putts toward the cup, or playing doubles on the courts. Twice the men ducked inside or under shelter, and just as they spent their days avoiding the overhead satellites, I spent my day hiding from the Gorilla. At five, the men gathered in the bar with the Colonel and Mr. Kelly, for what I assumed was not an evening Bible study, and I cursed my stupidity for not planting a bug in the one private place where all of the men could congregate.
I went outside and around to the rear of the hotel. I tried to look nonchalant beneath the windows of the bar, standing by the blooming hibiscus, pretending to look out over the water, my hands in my pockets, as if I had nothing on my mind besides my spiritual connection to the flora and fauna. Still as a painting, a lone iguana watched me watch him. He opened his mouth and poked his tongue out. As someone said, I get no respect.
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