CHAPTER FIVE

Smith promised me I could come home once I’d won the pony. All I needed was a guest list and a better understanding of who they were training and why, and I needed to know before New Year’s Eve. But, in spite of the short deadline, Smith let me spend the rest of Christmas with my father, a bit of sentimentality that, coming from Smith, scared me more than mercenaries and unhinged third-world politics.

My father seemed happy to see me, but after he opened my gift, a scarf, we ran out of things to talk about and spent most of the day watching television. Dinner was take-out Chinese. When I told my father I was leaving for Panama, he said, “I was wondering how long it would be before they kicked you out of the nation’s capital. What happened, you make a pass at the First Lady?” He wasn’t joking. My father never joked about the First Lady.

The next day I was flying into Panamanian airspace, watching the green landscape zip by and thinking December in the tropics might not be so bad after all. I had camouflaged myself in shorts, sandals, a jade-green shirt with orange flowers, and Wayfarer sunglasses. I was ready for anything.

To my surprise, Panama City looked shiny and new from a few thousand feet up. This banana-Miami crowded the curve of a muddy bay and threw up modern skyscrapers the way northern Virginia tossed up Starbucks. The fact that the tall buildings were built on a cocaine foundation didn’t make them any less impressive from the air.

Tocumen airport tried its best to live up to the skyline’s cosmopolitan promise with native artwork displayed as cultural artifacts along the corridor that ran between the gate and baggage claim. Signs told me that I could find similar artifacts for sale in the gift shop. I would soon find out that everything in Panama is for sale.

At the baggage claim, Panamanian families embraced loudly, Anglo businessmen scurried off to customs, and tourists shouldered their bags and consulted their guidebooks. Among the tourists were two young men who seemed eager to buy dope in a place where all the laws are like Texas. As far as I could tell, I was the only one smuggling in a satchel full of Gershwin.

I waited by the luggage carousel and watched as bag after bag was claimed, the crowd dissipated, and I was alone, watching the belt grind by, empty. Six uniformed and two plainclothes cops watched me with some amusement as it became clear that my three tuxedos, patent-leather shoes, my studs, and my ties were off on their own adventure. It took an hour to file a claim. I didn’t know the Spanish word for “luggage” and neither did the clerk. I pointed to one bag that looked similar to mine and she said, “Bueno,” and tried to give it to me. She was genuinely surprised when I declined.

My customs agent was eager to spread out everything I owned across her counter. Of the two of us, I think she was more disappointed about my lack of luggage than I was.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“That’s an MP3 player,” I said. “I wear it when I run.”

“And this?”

“My laptop,” I said.

Disappointed that it wasn’t a bomb, she took my passport and went away for a very long time, leaving me alone with a dozen policemen armed with automatic weapons and an annoyed disposition.

When she returned, I stepped outside to the taxi stand. Nothing, not even Washington with summer air so thick you could cut it into seat covers, prepared me for the heat of Panama. And I could feel things—small, bacterial, fungal things—growing on me. I knew that if I set down my carry-on Coach bag it would sprout legs and scurry off into the underbrush.

A cab in neon green, yellow, and red pulled to the curb. I said I wanted to go to “the Chinaman’s Drugstore.”

He looked at me and said, “You sure?”

I said I was, although I wasn’t, and he shrugged, put the car into gear, and took off toward the city.

I amused myself by counting the pictures of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard and wondering what you had to do to rewire Christmas lights for twelve volts.

I tried not to be too concerned about the driver’s reaction to the address I’d been given. I’d read the history of Panama on the plane and here I was, a beaming beacon of American middle class knowing that the locals had good reason to dislike all things gringo. For instance, one hundred years ago, when Colombia was reluctant to let us build our big ditch, Teddy Roosevelt carved Panama out of Colombia’s backside and set up a malleable dictatorship. The United States claimed a large strip of land on either side of the Canal, and called it the Zone, and ran it like an American colony. The Panamanians soon began to resent the gringos. The Americans ran the Canal, hiring the locals to cut the lawns of their tidy homes and watch their tidy kids go off to their tidy schools. So the Panamanians rioted a few times, just to get the gringos’ tight-assed attention. Once, they rioted over the name of a bridge.

When built, the bridge that arched over the Canal was either the Thatcher Ferry Bridge or the Bridge of the Americas, depending on who was talking. In the sixties some students tried to raise the Panamanian flag on the bridge, a riot followed, and several people, all Panamanians, were killed, shot dead by American soldiers. The Americans named the street Fourth of July Boulevard. After the riot, the Panamanians called it the Avenue of Martyrs.

Then there was that whole invasion-and-killing-and-leveling-a-large-part-of-the-city-while-snatching-Noriega thing. Some people still held a grudge about that, more than a decade later. Soreheads.

The driver turned off the wide main boulevard and into a two-lane street dedicated to the consumption of alcohol. From what I could see, many Panamanians were doing their best to keep the local bartenders employed. The store owners and clerks, free for siesta, lounged at small tables and eyed the gringo rolling by in the parrot-colored taxicab.

The driver stopped at a corner wine store, open on two sides and cooled by the ocean breeze blowing across white tile. The driver pointed and said, “This is the Chinaman’s Drugstore.”

“This is?”

“Yes. This is.”

“Okay.” I gave him twenty dollars. He didn’t offer me change. I got out and waited by the doorway.

A short man in a straw hat, his face round, his eyes red-rimmed, stood next to me. “Hey, muchacho. You need a ride?”

“No, I’m waiting for someone.”

“You looking to get high?”

“No, no, thanks.”

“You want a woman?”

“No.”

“You want a man?”

I had to laugh. “No, I’m okay.”

“Where you going? I take you anywhere you want to go, five bucks.”

“Take me to New York,” I said.

He liked that. “I go to New York,” he said with a smile, “and I never come home. There are plenty of fine women in New York.”

“Yes, fine women.”

“Where you going? Come on, I take you there for three bucks, no tip.”

I looked at my watch. The luggage ordeal had made me late. Maybe my ride had come and gone. “You know La Boca del Culebra?”

A cloud rolled across the sun and the entrepreneur’s disposition darkened. “That’s a bad place, amigo. Come on, let me take you to a nice hotel. We got Hilton, we got everything. Nice places, not like La Boca.”

“I have a job there,” I said.

The little man stiffened. “You? You work there?” Then he laughed. “Oh, you make a joke. Ha ha, very funny man. Come, I take you to a nice hotel.”

“What’s wrong with La Boca?”

“Yeah, slick, what’s wrong with La Boca?”

Neither of us had seen him approach. A tall, tanned man in his late twenties clasped the cab driver’s shoulder and squeezed it until his knuckles went white.

The cab driver shook his head. “Nothing, señor. La Boca is a fine place. Very nice. I give it five stars.” He slid out from under the new man’s grasp and backed away. With a tip of his straw hat, he hurried off.

The tall man looked down at me. He wore a black baseball cap, dark glasses, and dangled an unlit Camel between his lips. “You the piano player?”

“Yeah.”

He tilted his head and took me in from my sandals to my Hawaiian shirt. “You always dress like this?”

“Like what?”

“Never mind.” He pointed at my satchel. “Is that it?”

“They lost my bag.”

“Fucking airlines. Come on, we’ll fix you up.”

I followed him into the street to a Jeep made about the same time Smith was in his first firefight outside of Da Nang. “Get in,” he said.

I did.

The tall man wheeled the Jeep around in a one-eighty, drove up to the Avenue of the Martyrs, and turned left toward the bridge that had united the continents and divided the people forty years before. The Bridge of the Americas spanned the Pacific entrance to the Canal, hundreds of feet above the shipping lanes. Far below, freighters waited their turn through the locks. At the very horizon, a lake plucked from prehistory shimmered in the sun.

For the first time since we started, the driver spoke. “They call me Zorro. Like the movie.”

“They call me Harper,” I said. “Like the movie.”

“There was a movie?”

“With Paul Newman.”

“No shit. Is it any good?”

“Yeah. I thought so.”

The road was built to withstand the constant rain, but not well, and the seams of hot tar thumped against the tires.

“What’s your favorite?” Zorro asked.

“Favorite movie? That’s a tough one. I’d guess Citizen Kane.”

“Never saw it.”

“Dr. Strangelove?”

“Nope.”

“So what do you like?”

“Steven Seagal,” Zorro said. He held the cigarette between his lips, drove with his elbows, and cupped a lighter against the wind. “What else?”

“It Happened One Night.”

“Nope. How about Con Air?”

“Didn’t see it. What about Bringing Up Baby? Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn?”

“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 what 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 couple 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.”

“Oh,” I said, turning this over.

“I’ll get you some sheets and a towel and some clean shit to wear, then maybe I show you around town, huh?”

“Yeah, sure. Hey, Ren?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve always wondered, how come you’ve got a dime in your ear?”

“My father gave it to me,” he said.

I waited, but Ren didn’t offer anything more than a blank stare, as if he’d explained everything he was going to explain. I didn’t push it.

Ren left and I opened the window to the ocean air. I closed the corridor door and unpacked my satchel. I placed my autographed eight-by-ten of Duke Ellington on the dresser and set my laptop on the bed. I took out my MP3 player and unscrewed the back. Inside were several bugs. I pocketed one and taped the others to the bottom of the desk drawer. Hidden inside the earpieces of my sunglasses were three different lock picks and a small torque wrench. Most sets come with seven or more picks, plus the wrench, but I’ve found that you rarely use more than three. People who carry more than three are either inexperienced or show-offs.

I heard people moving around the other rooms and music from a distant radio blew in on the breeze. There was something else on the breeze, too, but it took me a minute to place it. It was gun oil.

Someone knocked and I said, “Come in.”

A thin man with sandy hair that curled in the humidity pushed open the door and said, “You the other FNG?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Welcome to Panama,” he said. “My name’s Cooper. Call me Coop.”

He shifted a volume of Joseph Conrad to his left hand so he could shake with his right.

“You reading Heart of Darkness?”

“What else?” Coop walked around the room, picking things up and laying them back down as if he were browsing through a souvenir shop. “Did you fly in?”

“Yes.”

“Some view, huh? I mean from the plane.” Coop sat on my bed and bounced on the springs.

“Yeah. But what’s an FNG?”

“Fucking New Guy,” Cooper said. He looked into my shaving kit. “I didn’t know what it was, either, until Ren told me. It’s a grunt thing.”

“Oh.”

He picked up my sunglasses and turned them around in the light. “As far as I know, there are three of us. Me, a guy they call Mad Dog, and you. You must be the piano player.”

“I am,” I said.

“I heard the last piano player got eaten by a snake.”

“A shark,” I said.

Cooper shrugged. “Just as long as it doesn’t eat me.” He put on the sunglasses, stood, and crossed back to the dresser where he picked up the MP3 player. “I’m replacing the guy who got shot downtown.”

“Is that a euphemism?”

“Whoa, and he uses big words, too.” Cooper put on the earphones and punched the button. When he didn’t hear anything he scowled and said, “Battery must be dead.” He picked up the picture of Ellington and said, “Is this real?”

I carefully took it from him and placed it back on the dresser. “Yes. It’s real.”

“Cool,” he said, and raised his eyebrows in appreciation. “You meet the Colonel?”

“Just now. I think we hit it off.”

Cooper took off the earphones, walked over to the window, and sat against the sill. “You’ll like the men here. I know some of them from the army,” he said. “You know Zorro?”

“He picked me up.”

“How about Ice? Meat?”

“No, and what’s with the names?”

Cooper laughed. “Apparently, it comes in handy when dealing with the Latins. They put great importance on a nom de guerre.” Coop opened my laptop.

I pointed with my chin and said, “You’ll tell me when you see something you like.”

Coop looked surprised to find himself with my laptop in his lap, as if someone had put it there in his sleep. “Oh, sorry. Just restless, I guess.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I got in last week, but like I said, I know some of these guys from Iraq. So what’s your specialty? Small arms, demolitions?”

“Gershwin,” I said. “Among other things.”

Cooper laughed again.

“What do you know about this other guy?”

“They call him Mad Dog. Real deal, I’ve heard. Been in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places we’re not supposed to know about. I’m sure he has some good qualities; I just haven’t seen them yet. So you really do play piano, I mean, not just as a hobby?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not just a hobby.”

“Have you met Kelly?”

“Not yet. I understand he’s the man around here.”

“Yeah, and his wife ran off with a USO singer. That’s the story, anyway. Personally, I think he killed them both and buried their bodies in the jungle.”

“This just gets better and better,” I said.

“And wait until you see his daughter. She was out on the beach today and she is so fine.” Cooper bit his bottom lip and slowly moved his head side to side in appreciation of the young Ms. Kelly’s brief appearance. “But anyone who gets near that’s got a death wish.” Cooper laughed again. He laughed easily, and I liked that, but his eyes turned down at the corners, making him look perpetually saddened by his situation, even when he was smiling, and I didn’t like the way he was checking out my gear. “Well, listen, nice meeting you and I’ll see ya tomorrow. We FNGs have to stick together, right?”

Cooper left and I polished his fingerprints off Ellington’s picture. Then I stripped, wrapped a towel around my waist, and went off for a shower, making sure to take my money with me.

I reached the end of the hallway and heard a man counting. Step by step, an extremely drunk, extremely large man placed both feet on each riser and counted, as if he were just now learning to climb stairs.

“Two hundred and forty-six!”

He weaved a bit and closed one eye trying to focus on me. When he raised his head I could see a white scar that ran along his throat, ear to ear. “Two hundred and—”

“Forty-seven,” I said.

“That’s a lot of steps. I’ve never seen that many steps in my life. And I seen a lot of steps.”

“You must be Mad Dog.”

He tried to salute, lost his balance, and stumbled sideways. His forearms were as big as my thighs and covered in tattoos, some good, some jailhouse.

“You,” he said, pointing at me, “must be the accordion player.” Then he laughed. “You’re so little,” he said, and held his finger and thumb a quarter inch apart. “Like a little puppy,” he said. “C’mere.”

“Why?”

“I can’t move my legs.”

He was still weaving at the top of the stairs, holding himself up by the banister. He draped an arm over my shoulder and I guided him into the corridor.

“Here we are,” he sang, “home sweet home.” I took the key from his hand, unlocked the door, and dropped him to his bunk.

“I had a little bit to drink.”

“I can see that.” So this was my backup, the bodyguard who would watch my six while I checked out the clientele.

Mad Dog looked up and said, “Where are your clothes?”

“I was on my way to the shower.”

“Let me buy you a drink, you little naked fucker.” He was up again, but weaving. A tiny push would do it. So I pushed him.

He fell back onto his bunk and lay there, staring at the ceiling. “Oh, now I’m going to have to kill you.” He tried to get up but couldn’t lift his bulk from the horizontal. Finally, he gave up and curled himself into a ball. “I’ll kill you tomorrow,” he said.

Cooper was standing in the corridor, looking in. “I see you met Mad Dog.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Well, then, I suggest you get some sleep, New Guy, because Mad Dog and I are going to run your ass off in the morning. Ain’t that right, Mad Dog?”

Mad Dog mumbled.

“That’s an affirmative,” Cooper said.

Mad Dog began to snore.

“You think we should cover him up?” I said.

“You his mother?”

“No.”

“Then leave him. He’ll be okay.”

“Okay.”

Ren poked his head up from the stairway and said, “Hey, Harper, you wanna go get laid?”