They will be correct as well. But neither viewpoint carries an ounce of currency when applied to this new Darwinian template of world government. The dynamic is neither evil nor good, neither left-wing nor right-wing. It is pure. It is power. In such an environment, liars often prosper and cheaters usually win. Things are changing. The hubs of world authority are in a constant state of flux. Why did I find that surprising? Why would anyone find it surprising?
“We almost there yet?” Garret was stirring in the left seat. He glanced out the window, then he sat up quickly. Jammed his headset down over his ears and said, “Christ, that’s Colon over there! We were supposed to cut inland way back.”
“I know, I know, but I didn’t want to wake you up and I didn’t want to fly into any mountains, so I reset the GPS and it gave me a new route.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to fly.”
“I’m a terrible pilot, but I’m a fair navigator. Some people feel safer over land, I happen to feel safer over water. Besides, I’ve never flown down the canal at night.” He said, “That’s the first problem. We’re not allowed to fly down the canal.”
“Can we fly along it?”
“Yeah. Just don’t buzz any cruise ships. We don’t want a bunch of newlyweds and nearly-deads complain’ to the Panamanian authorities about us.”
I was banking southwest now over a vast darkness that was Gatun Lake, one of the largest manmade lakes in the world. The channel was lit up like a freeway. Open all the locks at once, and it would be like pulling the plug on a bathtub. The lake would drain almost dry, not enough water left to float a pontoon boat, let alone a thousand- foot-long container ship.
The mountains fed the lake, the lake fed The canal. Thus the necessity of the locking system on this highway between two seas.
Garret said, “Your friend who’s picking you up at Paitilla Airport? He’s gonna be sittin’ on his hands twenty minutes or so longer than expected, ‘cause that’s how late we’re gonna be.”
“He’s the friend of a friend, really. A real live Zonie, fourth generation. Born here, went to high school here, and now he’s been temporarily stationed at the embassy. That’s what I was told, anyway. He’s a Company man.” Garret flew for a while before he said, “One of the Christians in Action fellas? One of the blue-shirt guys, is that the company you’re talking about?”
I didn’t reply to the question. “The best thing is, he says he lives near Gamboa. And he’s got a car I can use. Some kind of transportation once I get there.”
“Good on ya’,” Garret said. “Seems like it’s coming together bloody well.”
“So far.”
Panama City lay ahead, a void of the tangible insinuated by hills on the rim of horizon and moonlight. Gaillard Cut and the Continental Divide were out there. Gamboa and Gail Calloway were out there, too.
I was watching thunderheads to the southwest crackle with sulfurous light. The clouds vanished, then reappeared. The Aussie surprised me a little when, after a long silence, he replied, “No, that’s not what I meant when I asked if he was CIA. What I meant was, if you’re going to kill the fat man, it’ll be handy to have a guy like that on your side. A spook, I mean.”
18
The man driving the van from Paitilla Airport was probably in his mid-twenties, not more than a year or two out of some Ivy League college. He assumed a telltale variety of nasal wit that requires careful tending. Princeton, maybe Yale. The Company has always been big on recruiting from the Ivy Leagues.
But he was a Zonian, he said, the great-grandson of an engineer who’d come to the Zone back in the 1920s and stayed. Before the transfer, his mother and father both had had offices in the museumesque Canal Commission administration building with its red-tile roof up there on Ancon Hill. Now his great-grandparents and his grandparents were in the cemetery at Corozal, beneath the mango trees.
His name was Matt Davidson. Or so he claimed. Big rangy blond with a gawky, grinning Opie Taylor face. Had his aviator sunglasses in the pocket of his blue button-down shirt, sweat stains beneath both arms.
On the ground now, I was sweating, too. A hot night, like being immersed in bath water. So humid that when I first swung out of the plane I thought maybe that it’d just finished raining. But no. The tarmac was dry. Thunderheads were still strobing out there over the Pacific, sailing landward with the wind.
Davidson told me he’d just returned from a three-month assignment in Asia and man-oh-man was it good to get back to the Zone. “Couldn’t wait to get here and go to the Tablita for a Sobe and choris.”
I said, “Huh?”
He chuckled, “Sorry, forgot you’re from the States. Or maybe I’ve still got a bad case of moonpongitis. What I said was… it’s like Zonian Speak. Soberana’s a beer. Chorizo, that’s a kind of sausage. Really good sausage. Maybe we’ll get you one while you’re here.”
Like I’d stopped in for the weekend, me in my black turtleneck with leather gloves and a navy watch cap I’d borrowed from Garret.
“Moonpongitis?”
From the look on his face, I got the impression that he’d misspoken. It was like: uh-oh. “Just an expression I picked up somewhere. It means like gone, you know, stir crazy. But those sausages I was telling you about, choris, the best place to get them is this car wash called Tablita… “
No doubt, he’d said something he wasn’t supposed to say. Not a big deal. I would have never asked him about Asia-professional courtesy prohibited it-but he’s the one who offered up the familiar name. Moonpong? Phumi Moonpong, actually. It was a remote village in the Cambodian interior. The jungle was massive there, leaves the size of elephants’ ears in the high tree canopy, and vines that snaked out the portals of Hindu temples that were eight hundred years old. Villagers lived in hootches with swept lawns on the banks of a river named by French missionaries: the River of Sin. I was supposed to forget a name or a place like that? It was said that the missionaries so named it because they were pissed off about something or because the river was black from rice paddies.
Davidson’s small talk about the Zone didn’t interest me. All I cared about was that he apparently worked for the CIA. There was something very odd about friends of my friends arranging for a Company man to meet me at the airport, provide me with a ride and probably a place to stay if I needed it.
Why? Why should they risk even peripheral involvement in a fray between private citizens?
I thought Davidson might give me a hint let me know what was going on. But no, he played it straight as he drove through Panama City traffic, then into Balboa and out of town into the darkness of rain forest headed for Gamboa.
Nothing but careful conversation that seemed designed to prove to me that he really had grown up in the Zone: “I understand the political reasoning behind transferring the canal, but it still doesn’t seem right that they’re making us leave. We had our own court system, fire departments, hospitals, schools, everything. It was our home… “
Like it would be big news to me. Almost all Zonians felt that way. The man was filling up space, saying nothing.
He told me, “In the Zone, there was no crime, no unemployment, and if somebody got out of line, the company shipped their asses back to the states like yesterday.”
Same thing. Nothing.
Matt said he’d attended Balboa High, surfed Tits Beach, played golf at Amador, got the shits drinking from the Chagres, took the train to Cristobal for football games and snuck beers all the way back. “It was a good place,” he said. “Why else would our families choose to be buried here? Hey”-his tone brightened-“how can you tell if you’re a Zonian?”
I had to listen to him play the little game: You know you’re a Zonian if you’ve spray-painted your girlfriend’s name on a bridge… if your boat has a better paint job than your car… if you can name the president who gave the canal away but can’t name any presidents since…
