Beneath a Panamanian Moon (22 page)

“Yes. It means ‘with luck,' doesn't it?”

“It does.” Marquez looked confused, but I wasn't. “I will ask around. Perhaps he's new to Panama City.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

Marquez scribbled in a small notebook and when he tucked the notebook back into his jacket pocket I saw the pistol on his hip. He caught my look, gave me an embarrassed smile, and said, “The tourism industry is very competitive.”

“Yes, sir, I'll bet it is.”

“Please, sir,” he said, “if you can do me a favor.”

“I will if I can.”

“I think someone may be trying to kill you, and that would require a lot of paperwork.” He shook his head, the overworked civil servant, and said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to return home before they succeed?”

I promised I would try and he ambled off, in no hurry in the heat, toward the green sedan parked in front of the hotel.

Kelly stood on the veranda and watched him get in the car and drive away. He looked at me, his face squinting against the sun, until Marquez's car was through the gate. “You're confined to the compound, Harper, you got that?”

I said I did and we both knew I had no intention of staying where I was, but we had to do the dance. It was expected.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kelly's patience had run out. I knew that. There was no way he would let me off the isthmus alive and that meant I had to stay as far away from him as possible. The first opportunity he got, he'd pinch my head off like a grape.

I like to think of that as motivation.

After reshaping my nose in the mirror, I went down to the second floor and listened at the door. Not a creature was stirring, not even an agouti. I picked the doorknob lock in under thirty seconds, a personal best, and stepped inside. I figured that maybe, just maybe, the student files were somewhere in Kelly's apartment.

There was sunlight pouring in from the balcony, so bright it hurt my eyes. I found Kelly's bedroom, as spartan as his office, and searched his drawers, one by one. In the nightstand I found a Russian Makarov and wondered where he found the uncommon ammunition for the pistol in this part of the world. I looked behind the one picture, a Kmart print of
The Last Supper,
but there was no convenient safe—not that I had any great skill in safecracking. The floors were hardwood and I crawled around on my hands and knees looking for a trapdoor or loose board or maybe a box of handy info filed neatly under the bed. I searched until my face started throbbing and I had to stand up.

Kris's room was a little pinker than her father's, but even her room was as impersonal as a bus station. She had arrived on Christmas Eve, the same day I'd first heard about La Boca, a day devoid of any joy, peace, or goodwill, and hadn't taken the time to unpack. Her things fell out of an open suitcase and were strewn across the floor. I wasn't enough of a pervert to finger through her underthings, although I was enough of a pervert to think about it. There wasn't any hiding place for papers I could see, so I headed toward the kitchen. I was halfway across the living room when I heard someone on the balcony. I froze, held my breath, and hoped that whoever was out there couldn't hear the pounding of my heart.

The balcony doors were open and a hot breeze blew through the apartment. I smelled honeysuckle. I quickly tiptoed to the front door and slowly turned the knob. With a quick glance into the hall, I started out.

“Harper?”

Kris was standing with her back toward the ocean, the breeze fluttering the hem of her shirt.

“Hi, Kris.”

“What are you doing?”

“Uh, the door was open.”

“And you just came inside?” She tilted her head and looked at me. Her stare reminded me of her father. It was not pleasant.

“Uh, the truth is, I wanted to surprise you.”

She crossed the room and examined my eye, her fingertips barely touching the cheek. “Christ, Harper, you're more likely to scare me to death. What the hell happened to your face?”

“I ran into a tree,” I said.

“You need to be more careful around trees. Does it hurt?”

“No, but the way you're looking at me does.”

She laughed and said, “I'm sorry, but you look like something a bear ate and shit in the woods.”

“Thanks for that lovely simile.”

We stood for a moment, the topic of my face exhausted and any other logical topic of conversation way out of bounds.

“Hey, I was just about to go swimming. Want to come?”

“If your father found out, he'd kill me.”

“Daddy would what?” She waved that thought away as being completely ridiculous. “Harper, he's like the biggest pushover. You just have to know how to handle him. Besides, he's not here. He's off on one of his ‘missions.'”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “But I don't think so.”

Kris pulled on my arm. “Come on, don't be a jerk. It'll be fun.”

A few minutes later we climbed into her car and I said, “Maybe I should hide in the back. You know, for when we go through the gate.”

“Don't worry. I know a secret way out of this place.”

We drove toward the back of the compound, and down a rutted road that led to a gate in the chain-link fence. Kris got out and opened it, then got back in the car. “I cut the lock off days ago and no one's noticed,” she said. “I think we're safe.”

The road was so narrow that branches swept both sides of the open car. I ducked to avoid a branch at the same time Kris ducked and we bumped heads. My head, already beaten like a tambourine, felt like the top was going to explode. Kris giggled and rubbed the bump. I didn't stop her.

The trail broke onto a larger dirt road and Kris turned left. We followed the road through the deep green shade of the high-canopy rain forest. Kris turned down another rutted trail and came up a rise that overlooked a quiet lagoon, protected from the waves by a coral reef seventy yards out. She stopped and we got out and looked over the water. Tall palms rattled against a powder-blue sky. I said, “I thought places like this existed only in postcards.”

“Postcards don't have sand fleas. Can you swim with your nose like that?”

“I'm not going to swim,” I said, “I don't have a suit.”

“Neither do I.” Kris pulled her hair back into a ponytail and fastened it with a rubber band. “Well, you gonna take off your pants, or what?”

“No, I'll stay up here.”

“Whatever.” She stripped off her shirt and shorts, ran down to the sand and waded into the water.

There wasn't much point in my standing by the car with my thoughts in my head so I turned my back and peeled off my clothes.

When I turned around, she was treading water, watching me. She smiled and swam off toward the reef. By the time I was in, dog-paddling to keep my busted nose in the air, Kris was thirty yards out, her skin glistening wet, shiny as a seal.

I paddled out toward her. The water was vodka clear and sunlight rippled across the bottom. A small school of fish swept under me, darting one way, then another. I saw a manta, black as a manhole, glide across the bottom. Its edges stirred up tiny sand devils that swirled in the eddy.

Kris touched my shoulder. Her wet hair framed her face and water drops sparkled on her eyelashes. “I just wanted to tell you about the sharks in the lagoon.”

“You mean there are sharks here?” I didn't want to be the second piano player eaten by a shark. Nobody wants to be second at anything.

“Sometimes a sand shark, but nothing that's going to eat you. I've only seen one great white and I came out here almost every day last summer.”

“Alone?”

Kris smiled. “Yeah, most of the time. Let's swim out by the reef. There's more to see.” Kris went under, her feet giving a graceful little kick at the surface that propelled her out toward the white chop.

I went after her. I watched my own shadow glide as gracefully as the manta over the sand. Bits of rock and coral poked through the smooth bottom and everywhere I looked there were fish in brilliant motion. The wall of coral rose up in front of me and I watched a shadow move smoothly next to my own. Kris said, “You having fun?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“I'm glad you came. Just be careful of the sea urchins. They burn like fire. And don't get too close to the coral because it'll cut you.”

“Okay.”

“And you don't want to bleed in the water.”

“You really know how to put a guy at ease.”

“Just stuff you should know.” Then she was gone again, smooth and sleek and shiny. I swam after her, watching her long legs kick, and thought that with all of the fish and coral and bright fronds of sea flora, Kris was easily the prettiest creature in the pool.

A large school of yellow and black fish engulfed us, hundreds of them, thin and fast and ticklish. Kris grabbed my arm. “We need to get out.”

“Why?”

“Just get out!” And then she was gone, kicking fast toward the beach.

When I climbed up onto the sand she said, “Those are tiger fish. They only run like that because of sharks.”

“But you said—”

“I said they rarely come past the reef. But when they do, they're usually hungry and they push a school of tigers in front of them. It's best to be safe.” Kris sat up and pointed. “Look.”

I couldn't see anything at first, just the sunlight on the water. Then I saw the delta of the shark fin, cutting through the waves like a bayonet. It was moving fast, following the tiger fish across the open bowl of the lagoon.

“I've had enough swimming for today, how about you?” Kris said.

“It's going to be a long time before I get into the tub.”

Kris brushed the sand from between her toes. “So, what do you think? You like it here?”

“Yeah, I mean, apart from the shark.”

“I meant Panama.”

“I've been in better places.”

Kris curled up on her side, resting her head on the back of her hand. “Tell me what you're doing here, or is that some big government secret?”

“I'm a piano player. The Colonel needed a piano player for his big party. That's all.”

“Okay. So don't tell me. You have a girlfriend? Back home, I mean.”

“No.” For the first time, I was ashamed to think that of all the women I'd known in Washington, not one of them was single. “No, no girlfriends.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Not today.”

Kris laughed. I liked the sound of it. She rolled over onto her back and watched the clouds. “I'm serious,” she said. “Meat thinks you're some kind of secret agent.”

“That's not true. Meat does not think.”

Kris laughed again. It was even nicer the second time.

“What'd you do in high school? Any sports?”

“I've always played the piano. I had a steady gig at the veterans' home. Oh, and I was a disc jockey for a few months at an oldies station. The hits of the sixties, over and over and over. They call it ‘oldies' because it gets so old.”

I rolled over to my side so I could see Kris stretched out next to me, her eyes closed, her hands behind her head. Her breasts pointed up at the tinted sky and my eyes followed her flat stomach down to the tangle of reddish-blond hair where beads of salt water glistened in the sun.

“So why didn't you play something else?”

“The station manager. She was the wife of the local real estate tycoon. She had two toy poodles who left turds in the break room and pee in the hall.”

“Very nice.”

“And she had a voice like a truck rolling over broken typewriters.”

Kris laughed again. Her stomach fluttered and her breasts jiggled in a way that inspired a physical response hardwired deep inside the primal roots of my lizard brain.

“So what happened?”

“When?” I was having a hard time keeping my mind on the story.

“Why'd you quit?”

“I played Otis Redding.”

“What's wrong with Otis Redding?”

“Nothing. But this woman stuck her face in the control room door and said, in that voice that could grind steel, ‘Johneeee, isn't that a little too Negroid for our sound?'”

“She actually said ‘Negroid'?”

“Yeah. Pretty progressive, huh? So I apologized and she went away. Then I put on James Brown, ‘Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud.'”

“Right on, brother.”

“I was fired.”

“Uh-oh.”

“So I broke into the studio, barricaded the doors, put on a two-hour tape of NWA and Run DMC, you know, Old School, and climbed out the back window. It took them forty-five minutes to bust in and stop the tape.”

“Ever think you'd be stuck in a place like Panama?”

“Never. What about you?”

“Oh, I've grown up with this shit. The Philippines, mostly. Now that's a place that's truly fucked up. You want a recipe for ruining paradise, start with the Spanish, hand off to the Catholic church, and then, when they're through with it, send in the Marines.”

I tried to think of a place where that had happened that wasn't fucked up and couldn't. “This place wouldn't be half bad without all the politics,” I said.

“That's what my mother said about Washington.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I think your mother and I would have gotten along.”

“How'd you get here, John, I mean here, at the hotel? Were you in the service?”

“Yeah. I was. Never saw combat. Too busy playing elevator music at the officers' club.”

“Why'd you join?”

“My father always said we were obligated to serve our country. But when my brother didn't come home, we lost heart in that patriotic stuff.”

“Your brother was killed?”

“His helicopter went down in the first gulf war. I was twelve and I remember it like it was yesterday. Guy comes to the door. I was watching a Pirates game. I heard my mother scream and my father say, over and over, ‘No, it's not true, it's someone else's boy. You've made a mistake. It's someone else's boy.'