He found himself staring down at two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, the Army Commendation Medal and four Purple Hearts. He had never seen anything like it.
‘Far away and long ago, I paid for the right to know who killed my child. I bought that right with my blood. You owe me that name, Mr Austin.’
The vice detective walked to the window and looked across at Norfolk. It was irregular, completely irregular. Worth his job on the force.
‘Madero. Benyamin “Benny” Madero. Headed up a Latino vice gang. Very violent, very vicious.’
‘Thank you,’ said the man behind him. He collected his bits of metal.
‘But in case you’re thinking of paying him a private visit, you’re too late. I’m too late. We’re all too late. He’s gone. He’s back in his native Panama. I know he did it, but I don’t have enough to apply through the courts.’
A hand pushed open the door of the small emporium of Oriental art off Madison at 28th Street, Manhattan. Above the portal a bell jangled with the movement of the door.
The visitor looked around at the shelves stacked with jade and celadon, stone and porcelain, ivory and ceramic; at elephants and demi-gods, panels, wall hangings, parchments and innumerable Buddhas. At the rear of the shop a figure emerged.
‘I need to be someone else,’ said Calvin Dexter.
It had been fourteen years since he had given the gift of a new life to the former Vietcong jungle fighter and his wife. The Oriental did not hesitate for a second. He inclined his head.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Please come with me.’
It was 15 March 1992.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Settlement
The fast fishing boat Chiquita slipped away from the quay in the resort port of Golfito just before dawn and headed down-channel for the open sea.
At her helm was owner and skipper Pedro Arias and if he had reservations about his American charter party he kept them to himself.
The man had turned up the previous day on a trail bike with local Costa Rican plates. In fact it had been bought, second-hand but in excellent condition, further up the Panamerican Highway at Palmar Norte where the tourist had arrived by local flight from San José.
The man had strolled up and down the quay, checking out the various moored game-fishing boats before making his choice and his approach. With the trail bike chained to a nearby lamp-post and his haversack over his shoulder, the man looked like a mature backpacker.
But there was nothing ‘backpacker’ about the block of dollars he laid on the cabin table. This was the sort of money that caught a lot of fish.
But the man did not want to go fishing, which was why the rods were all racked along the cabin ceiling as the Chiquita cleared the headland at Punta Voladera and emerged into the Golfo Dulce. Arias set her head due south to clear Punta Banco an hour away.
What the gringo actually wanted accounted for the two plastic drums of extra fuel strapped into the stern fishing deck. He wanted to be run out of Costa Rican waters, round the headland at Punta Burica and into Panama.
His explanation that his family was vacationing in Panama Ci
ty and that the visitor wished to ‘see some of the Panamanian countryside’ by riding the length of the country struck Pedro Arias as being as substantial as the sea mist now dissolving in the rising sun.
Still, if a gringo wanted to enter Panama on a trail bike off a lonely beach without passing through certain formalities, Señor Arias was a man of wide tolerances, especially where neighbouring Panama was concerned.
At the breakfast hour the Chiquita, a thirty-one-foot Bertram Moppie, cruising happily at twelve knots over calm water, cleared Punta Banco and emerged into the swell of the real Pacific. Arias pulled her forty degrees to port to follow the coast two more hours to Burica Island and the unmarked border.
It was 10 a.m. when they saw the first finger of Burica Island lighthouse jutting above the horizon and half past the hour as they turned the corner and veered back to the northeast.
Pedro Arias swept his arm towards the land to their left, the eastern coast of the Burica Peninsula.
‘Now is all Panama,’ he said. The American nodded his thanks and studied the map. He jabbed with a forefinger.
‘Por aqui,’ he said.
The area he indicated was a stretch of coast where no towns or resorts were marked, just a place that would have some abandoned empty beaches and some tracks back into the jungle. The skipper nodded and changed course to cut a straighter and shorter line across the Bay of Charco Azul. Forty kilometres, a tad over two hours.