8
The taxi rolling down the wide toll road called the Corredor Sur from Tocumen International Airport on the city’s eastern edge was white and red faded near pink by the scorching Panamanian sun. It was a Buick, about as old as Annja herself. Its air conditioner wheezed asthmatically and thumped alarmingly without appreciably thinning the humid heat. The cabbie ran it full-on anyway, despite having all the windows rolled down. Its noise and the early-afternoon traffic sounds of downtown Panama City did have the beneficial effect of mostly drowning out the cab’s CD player, which was chugging out terrible mid-nineties studio-gangsta rap at a volume that would’ve rattled the windows had they been up. Annja could feel the beats in her teeth.
They turned off the highway at a downtown exit. As with a lot of Latin American cities everything except the skyscraper-central middle of the business district interspersed shiny looming modern buildings with smaller, more inhabitable-looking older ones. In this case older meant mostly a particularly baroque variant of Spanish Colonial that Annja found especially charming.
Looking out the window at the awning-shaded shops and the crowds Annja was struck by a resemblance to New Orleans’ Latin Quarter. For all its well-publicized French heritage her hometown owed as much cultural debt to its long period of Spanish occupation as to France.
She did find herself wondering, Does archaeology ever happen anywhere it isn’t hot or humid? Although to be fair, she had to admit that she wasn’t exactly there to do archaeology. She had archaeological aims, though—to try to make sure an unknown artifact was properly conserved. So maybe that counted.
Her Romanian contact had used what Annja suspected was pirated NSA image-comparison software to sift through terabytes of raw overhead imaging. She had a feeling not all of it was supposed to be publicly available.
Her hotel, the Executive, stood in the midst of Panama City’s booming financial district. Annja had picked it because it got good reviews online, its rates were reasonable and also because, to her thoroughly irrational delight, it looked like nothing so much as a tower of giant white Lego. She tipped the driver, a dark taciturn man who had spoken English with a Punjabi accent, and wore a maroon turban.
The Executive staff, perhaps having seen American currency changing hands, leapt forward to help Annja with her bags.
Inside the lobby was cool, bright and clean. There was no line. Panama wasn’t exactly a leading summer vacation spot for Northern Hemisphere folk. The neat, compact clerk was cheerful and quite efficient.
Annja walked toward the elevator. A bell-person, a commodore at least, by the splendor of his uniform, trundled a laden luggage cart after her with much creaking of casters. The newspapers for sale in the lobby boxes screamed at her in Spanish and English—Bodies Found in Boathouse.
It was the same message they had imparted with equal stridency at Tocumen, when she had finally cleared customs. It gave her a tight feeling in her gut. She didn’t fail to believe in coincidence, exactly. She’d encountered her share, and several other people’s, too, she judged. Such as when she found the sword. Of course, if she saw the same vehicle or the same face in the crowd, as she went forth about her business this late morning and afternoon, she’d suspect she was being shadowed. She had been before, and was pretty sure she would be again.
She did not believe that arriving in Panama City in pursuit of a white motor-yacht her friends had tracked through the canal from the Netherlands Antilles by sifting satellite photos to discover a whole bunch of guys had just been gunned down in a boathouse in the old harbor district, came anywhere near coincidence.
Her hotel room was clean and fairly comfortable. She clicked on the television, where a local news broadcast quickly confirmed her suspicions. A sixth body had been discovered, bobbing in the harbor. Being Latin American television, it gleefully showed the corpse of a male floating with arms outflung and a seagull perched with its web feet in the salt-and-pepper thatch of his chest.
“And thanks so much for the wonder of zoom lenses,” Annja said. She looked away, but left the sound on while she hung her few changes of clothes in the closet.
The authorities, she learned, blamed the massacre on a drug deal gone bad. Next—the sun is expected to set in the West later today, she thought with a grimace.
Still, she told herself, don’t be an ingrate. Had it not been for the perpetual war on drugs, and the equally smashing success of the war on terror, she would have found herself facing many more uncomfortable questions about a certain propensity she displayed to turn up in proximity of the freshly dead.
She left the TV running when she cruised out the door. It was a minor security measure to discourage the amateurs—this was the Third World and hence thick with them.
SEVEN HOT, FRUSTRATING, increasingly waterlogged hours after setting forth, Annja shoved her weary, footsore way back through the revolving door into the hotel lobby. She had negotiated the Panama City public transit system, labyrinthine and irrational even by Latin American standards, with a combination explorer’s instinct and hard-won experience. The sun had dropped into the Pacific in the alarmingly abrupt way it did in the lower latitudes, so that you almost expected it to send a vast boiling tsunami hurtling toward shore, or at the very minimum to make a loud splash. It had left the downtown streets to the neon lights, taillights and loud music and at least as many acres of suntanned skin as there was asphalt.
Annja hadn’t found any answers.
She hit the bar in the hotel. She needed to recharge and to come up with a new plan since no one she’d encountered on the waterfront would admit to knowing anything about the mysterious yacht or the bloody massacre.
Her attention was drawn to one end of the bar. Loudly cursing his fate and the television over the bar, a man grumbled to himself about the current newscast and the “nobody-heard-nothin’ boathouse massacre.”