Beneath a Panamanian Moon Page 3

  “What is that?”

  “It is the list of the men my husband will meet tonight in Baltimore. There is something bad happening here, John.”

  “I don’t know if this will help,” I said, taking the slip of paper. “But I’ll pass it along.”

  Mariposa placed her hand on my jaw, her nails pressing into the soft flesh of my cheek. “When were you going to tell me, John?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you were leaving for Panama.”

  As a professional spy, I used to spend hours in front of the mirror practicing my look of bored nonchalance, but Mariposa’s question caught me gaping like a fish.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

  I found my voice and said, “But I’m not. There was some talk, yes…”

  Mariposa pressed her breasts against my chest and breathed champagne in my face. “Every woman who has ever heard you play and wished she was your instrument—and that is almost every wife in Washington—has heard this rumor. John Harper is leaving the city. The whispers as to why are quite interesting, even for this place. There are the usual pregnancies, one even suggests a mother-daughter doubleheader.”

  Mariposa was a great fan of the Baltimore Orioles.

  She pushed me against the wall and into a distant corner, surrounded by the soft folds of fur and cashmere.

  “Mariposa, these rumors are just that. Rumors.”

  She ran a nail around my ear and said, “What I find interesting, John, is how did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That I would be in Panama for New Year’s. Honestly, Mr. Harper, I thought our relationship was one of business.” Mariposa’s lips were so close to mine that with another coat of lipstick we’d have committed a cardinal sin.

  “You’re going to be in Panama?” I began to sweat in that overheated cloakroom. Someone’s cell phone went off, the tone dampened by layers of expensive outerwear.

  “I am,” she said. “My husband is to meet people there.” She suddenly froze and put her finger against my lower lip.

  “What is it?”

  “Sssh,” she said, as tense as a deer.

  I listened for Wanda, the coat-check woman, telling us she was back, but the voice I heard belonged to a man. And he was agitated, speaking in Spanish, too quickly for me to pick up all but a few words. He was looking for Wanda, that much was clear, and was calling her a cow, an idler, or an economic slump, I wasn’t sure which.

  It was the Major.

  Mariposa and I held our breaths.

  After a brief discussion, the Major started pawing through the coats himself, all the while ranting about something that had ruined his Christmas.

  “He does not like you,” Mariposa whispered.

  I caught the words piano and pistola, words I could translate without Mariposa’s help.

  General Cruz made soothing sounds, calming his aide. He mentioned Renaldo and Luis, two of the no-neck bodyguards the General traveled with, which didn’t do much to improve my holiday spirit.

  The Major answered that a husband should clean his own house.

  The General, his tone philosophical, said some things about matrimonio, and young brides, and then he used the word piano again with something that sounded uncomfortably like eviscerate. Mariposa’s wide-eyed look of panic translated all I really needed to know.

  The cloakroom had four long rows of coats, with Mariposa and I at the very end of the fourth row. That gave me some comfort until Mariposa touched the shoulder of an overcoat and whispered, terror sharpening her voice, “This is my husband’s.”

  The Major found the general’s coat and continued looking for his. I heard him moving down the first row, pushing overcoats back and forth on their hangers. At the top of the second row, the Major said something that made General Cruz laugh. I caught something uncomfortable about a musico’s pinga and hungry dogs. Or, it might have been hungry hair. My Spanish needs work.

  Mariposa’s eyes, so expressive, nearly vibrated in panic.

  The Major searched the third row for his overcoat. The hanger hooks zipped back and forth on the wooden rod as the Major became more agitated. He reached the end of the third row and said in English, “It’s always the last place you look, isn’t it, sir.”

  “Indeed.”

  The Major rounded the top of the third row and headed into the fourth. I pulled Mariposa into the folds of clothing and down to our hands and knees. We waited, face-to-face, barely breathing, as the Major’s patent-leather shoes paced back and forth in front of the coats.

  He cursed and returned to the third row. We watched as he marched up and down that aisle. With another curse, he came back to the fourth row. That’s when I noticed it. There in the aisle was the slip of paper Mariposa had smuggled in to me, still warm, and still incriminating enough to get us both killed.

  I watched his shiny black shoes approach and stop a foot from where we were hiding. The Major pushed aside the shoulders of hanging overcoats, one by one, searching for his. I carefully reached out from under the swaying hems and had my fingers on the paper when the Major stepped sideways and placed his sole squarely on his wife’s stationery. I slowly pulled my hand back.

  The Major, frustrated, started shoving each overcoat away from its neighbor, creating great gaps in our cover. Mariposa and I had to scurry ahead of his search until we hit the wall and could go no further. The coats parted, three feet away, then two, then the Major’s shiny black shoes were next to us. I could have reached out and untied them.

  “Major Cruz, I am so sorry. I just had to step away for a moment.”

  The Major made noises of understanding, underlined with a rumble of irritation.

  “Please, allow me,” the coat-check woman said, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I took a breath. We watched her low-heeled approach. Wanda parted the overcoats and looked down at us with disgust. She removed the Major’s overcoat and helped him into it.

  The Major gave her a tip, thanked her, and said to the General, “So, Luis and Rodrigo are informed?”

  “Yes, and by morning, you and your young wife will be able to enjoy Navidad in peace.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A moment later Wanda said, “They’re gone. You two heathens can come out now.”

  Mariposa and I scrambled out from under the coats. Mariposa hurried off, leaving me alone to face the wrath of Wanda. I tried offering her a fifty-dollar bill, hoping Grant’s face would soften her hard Christmas heart. But she refused the money, crossing her arms and shaking her head with disgust. “And on Christmas Eve, too,” she said. “You should be ashamed, Mr. Harper.”

  “Please, Wanda, take the money.”

  “I don’t want your money.” A new light came into her eyes and a smile flickered. “But there is something you can do for me.”

  I backed away, shaking my head. I was resolved not to get sucked into another one of Wanda’s holiday plans. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “You know what you got to do, Mr. Harper. What you did at Thanksgiving.”

  I shook my head. “No, Wanda, please, not that. I’m way too tired.”

  Wanda stood in the doorway and said, “Fine. Be that way. Just don’t come asking no favors of Wanda.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Not ever.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I promise.”

  “But you got my number, right?”

  “I do, Wanda, but I won’t be calling. Have a good Christmas.” I edged past her but not quickly enough for me to get by before she grabbed my backside.

  “Fine thing on Christmas Eve,” I said.

  “You don’t know what presents Wanda has for you, honey, make you forget all about Saint Nick.”

  My last set was a short one, with few people left besides the wait staff, and as they picked up glasses and holiday napkins, I packed my music, went down the elevator, and headed north past GWU. As
I walked to the Metro station I wondered why my particular stars all seemed to point to Panama, a twisted little country at the ass end of the continent. I knew nothing about Panama except it had a canal and a bad history with the United States. I didn’t even own a panama hat. But the damn country kept coming up in dangerous conversation all day and I didn’t like it. I’m not a superstitious man by nature, but I don’t purposely walk under ladders.

  Mariposa had made me promise to leave town for a few days, at least until the Major cooled off, so I went back to my apartment to pack a few things. I would spend the holiday with my father, which would be novel for both of us. It’s not that we don’t talk, it’s just that when we do, the conversation never goes anywhere either of us wants to be.

  Still, it was Christmas. Peace, goodwill, and the milk of human kindness was in the air, and they almost got me killed.

  I caught one of the last trains to Crystal City and exactly eleven minutes later was gliding up the long escalator to ground level, still wondering why Panama.

  Crystal City is a clot of high-rises that are a lot less magical than their name. Home to hotels, office buildings, and an underground crammed with trendy shops, Crystal City is a temporary stop for most. For me, it had been my home for three years. I have a three-room apartment with no furniture other than a bed and a baby grand piano. I don’t even own a TV, a fact no one can fathom in this hyperconnected city.

  Crystal City stands across from the Pentagon to the north and Reagan National Airport to the east. Had I looked out my window September 11, I could have watched that plane come in low over the Potomac. Apart from the grim possibility of witnessing Armageddon, Crystal City is about as stimulating as your grandmother’s house on New Year’s Eve, unless you thrive on conformity, which many of my uniformed neighbors naturally do.

  I had left a book in my car so I went first into the parking garage. The garage is in the basement of my building and, like a cavern, is a constant fifty-four degrees. If the piano business ever fell off I figured I could grow mushrooms down there to supplement my unemployment.

  I unlocked my car, a used Mazda I bought cheap from a fleeing Democrat, got my book, a novel about a former FBI profiler who supposedly lived in my building, and hit the elevator button for the trip upstairs. The doors opened. A gorilla in Brooks Brothers was standing inside, his hands clasped in front of him. He cracked his knuckles and smiled. A gold tooth winked at me.

  I begged his pardon and backed away. I looked behind me and there was another man, this one in blue Armani, standing by the last row of cars. He was smiling, too. Everyone was smiling this Christmas Eve except for me and maybe Wanda, the coat-check woman.

  I wasn’t used to fans following me home and I got the feeling that my autograph was not what they wanted. The first man stepped from the elevator and the doors closed behind him. The second man stepped away from the cars and I heard the snick of a blade opening. It echoed off the concrete and made my chest feel as cold and hollow as the car park.

  The first man took three steps toward me and I found myself backed against a new Volvo. The man was big and his muscles strained the fabric of his jacket. He reached for me, his hand the size of my head, but he moved as slow as a sloth, as if he were performing underwater. I rolled along the Volvo’s side until I nearly fell into the gap between the front bumper of this car and the rear bumper of the next. A blinking red light on the Volvo’s dashboard caught my eye.

  The second man, the thin man in Armani, had worked his way to the other side. The knife blade in his fist caught the safety lights. I looked at the first man, then the second, and then I pushed my ass against the Volvo. Instantly the car sprang to life. Its alarm whooped, its horn beeped, and the headlights flashed. The two men stopped, struck stupid by the chaos. I ducked between the two cars, kicking an Infiniti as I passed. It added its horn and alarm to the Volvo’s solo.

  The two men went sideways and caught up to me between a rented Chevy sedan and a Lincoln Navigator. They rushed in, intent on catching me before the cops arrived. I could see the worry on their faces and the distraction over the alarms. I hoped it would be enough.

  I shouldered the Navigator into honking distress as the first man’s paw landed on my shoulder. I swung my back to the Chevy and he brought his fist around to meet my face. I watched the knuckles grow to the size of a small planet and then ducked. His hand smashed the driver’s-side window of the rental. The second man swung the knife at my ribs and the blade snagged my jacket. I struck out with the hardback, hitting the man’s nose. Blood sprayed across his mouth and chin and he dropped the knife. I fell to the concrete and rolled beneath the Navigator, coming up the other side, and sprinted for the gate, hitting every other car along the way until the basement garage was so filled with noise that it was almost impossible to bear.

  I hit the gate, hurdled the crossbar, and sprinted across the asphalt and grass toward Crystal Drive. A gray Cadillac pulled to the curb and another man jumped from the passenger side. I faked to the left and the guy went left, then I hit it hard to the right, up over the hood of the Cadillac, and the guy nearly came out of his socks trying to reverse himself. I sprinted across Crystal Drive, dodged a station wagon, my tuxedo tails flapping behind me, my patent-leather shoes beating the pavement, the Italian soles so thin that I could have stepped on a cannoli and gained a pound. As I ran past the Water Park towers I heard the man’s footsteps slapping the sidewalk behind me.

  I vaulted a boxwood and a low concrete wall just as the Cadillac caught up to me, sliding to a stop on Crystal Drive. The driver got out and I heard the sound of a cough, and then the crack of a supersonic bullet flying past my skull. I ducked right at the rail station and ran down the trail that would take me to the bike path that paralleled the GW Parkway.

  The brick trail curved left and right like an inebriated snake, denying the man behind me a clear shot. Then I hit the tunnel that ran beneath the parkway, a seventy-five-meter straight sprint that would give him plenty of time to stop and aim. Which he did.

  I heard the pistol cough, heard two cracks as rounds went by my ear. A bullet took out a piece of the asphalt at my feet and then another crack and another tug on my jacket.

  I came up the other side, the Metro line over my head, the parkway on my right, and Reagan National, lit up like a Christmas pageant, on my left. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the driver still chasing me, but I’d put an extra fifty yards between us, and even a champion shot would have a hard time hitting a moving target at that distance. He apparently thought so, too, because he stopped, his hands on his knees, and watched me as I sprinted all out into the darkness.

  A few minutes later I felt safe enough to stop. I jogged over to a bench near the end of the Reagan National runway where families come and thrill to the northbound jets taking off, so close you could almost reach out and touch the shiny bellies as they roared overhead. But I was the only person there this night, this Christmas Eve, and as I punched in the number on my cell phone, I fingered the bullet hole in the fabric of my tuxedo jacket.

  She answered the phone.

  “Wanda, I’ve decided to take you up on your offer.”

  She didn’t sound surprised. “I’m sure the Lord will bless you for it, honey.”

  “But I need you to pick me up. You know that park off the GW where you can watch the planes?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you come and get me?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  As I waited, my sweat drying in the chill air, I listened to the planes roar overhead, the turbulence making that mysterious swooshy crackling noise that makes kids pee, just a little, in their pants.

  Fifteen minutes later an old Pontiac rolled to a stop, the window zipped down, and Wanda said, “Come on, honey, we got people waiting.”

  I got in.

  “I thought maybe you’d change your mind about tonight.”

  “I am at your service, Wanda.”

  “You a good man, Mr. Harper, sometime
s you just don’t know it yourself.”

  A half hour later I slid onto the worn bench of an old Suzuki upright, a piano that looked as if it had been moved down several flights of stairs with no help other than gravity.

  I was in the dayroom of the W.E.B. DuBois Retirement Home in Southeast D.C. Rows of folding chairs were full of little women ranging in color from dark chocolate to coffee and cream. One white face lit up the third row like a single vanilla wafer in a plateful of mocha fudge.

  As I played, Wanda’s octogenarian mother sat next to me and sang in a thin, warbly soprano. I played “The Little Drummer Boy” so many times that it was weeks before I could shake those rummy-tum-tums out of my hands. And it would be months before I could shake the look on Smith’s face out of my head. He was sitting there in the third row, handling the bass and smiling a smile that had little to do with the joy of the Christ child’s Nativity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning, I met Smith in the costume shop behind the union’s rehearsal hall.

  I threaded through a platoon of dancers warming up for a Christmas show at the White House and continued past the marching band that would play on the Ellipse.

  Smith was in the costume shop trying on a tux for a dinner that night. I stood in the doorway. The place was hot enough to brown biscuits. Smith turned left and right in front of the mirrors and when he saw me all three of his reflected faces asked the girl searching for ruby studs to “see if you can round up some coffee.”

  Smith looked as comfortable in that tux as Mussolini must have looked in that tree. His bow tie was undone and hanging around his neck as if he were about to belt out “My Way,” and a white carnation pinned to his lapel sagged in the steam heat.

  “Sit down, son.” Smith pulled his lapels straight and said, “What a jungle fuck.” He looked sideways at his triple reflection and asked, “Do you think this is right? The white carnation makes me look like an undertaker, but the red makes me look like a pimp. What do you think?”

  “The red, sir. It matches your eyes.”