When he stood alone on his balcony in the darkness, which was what he liked to do each evening after work, maybe with one of Uncle Benny’s small cigars, and scented the night smells of luscious flowers on the damp air and watched the lights swimming in the rainy mist and glimpsed through fitful clouds the queue of boats at anchor in the mouth of the Canal, the abundance of his good luck instilled in him a keen awareness of its fragility: you know this can’t last, Harry boy, you know the world can blow up in your face, you’ve watched it happen from this very spot, and what it’s done once it can do again whenever it feels like it, so look out.
Then he would stare into the too-peaceful city, and very soon the flares and the red and green tracer and the hoarse tattoo of machineguns and the jackhammer rattle of cannons would start to create their own mad daytime in the theatre of his memory, just as they had on that December night in 1989, when the hills blinked and shuddered as huge Spectre gunships flew in unopposed from the sea to punish the mostly wooden slums of El Chorrillo – as usual it was the poor who were to blame for everything – bludgeoning the burning hovels at their leisure, then going off to replenish themselves and coming back to bludgeon them again. And probably the attackers never meant it to be that way. Probably they were fine sons and fathers, and all they meant to do was take out Noriega’s comandancia until a couple of shells strayed off course, and a couple more followed. But good intentions in wartime do not easily communicate themselves to the subjects of them, self-restraint passes unnoticed, and the presence of a few fugitive enemy snipers in a poor suburb does not explain its wholesale incineration. It’s not much help saying, ‘We used the minimum force’ to terrified people running barefoot for their lives over blood and smashed glass, dragging suitcases and children with them on their way to nowhere. It’s not much help to maintain that the fires were started by vindictive members of Noriega’s Dignity Battalions. Even if they were, why should anyone believe you?
So the screams were soon coming up the hill, and Pendel, who had heard screams in his time and uttered a few, would never have supposed that one human scream would be able to assert itself above the sickening drone of armoured vehicles or the hump-clump of state-of-the-art ordnance, but it really could, particularly when there were a lot of screams together, and they were delivered by the lusty throats of children in terror and accompanied by the porky stink of burning human flesh.
‘Harry, come inside. We need you, Harry. Harry, come back from there. Harry, I do not understand what you are doing out there.’
But that was Louisa screaming, Louisa wedged upright in the broom cupboard under the stairs, with her long arched back braced into the joinery for the greater protection of her children: Mark nearly two who was hugged into her belly, soaking her through his nappy – Mark, like the Yanqui soldiers, seemed to have unlimited supplies of ammunition – Hannah kneeling at her feet in her Yogi bear dressing gown and slippers, praying to somebody she insisted on calling Jovey, who was afterwards perceived to be an amalgam of Jesus, Jehovah and Jupiter, a sort of divine cocktail run up from the dregs of spiritual folklore that Hannah had assembled in her three years of life.
‘They know what they’re doing,’ Louisa kept repeating in a high military bark unpleasantly reminiscent of her father’s. ‘This is not a one-off thing. They have it all figured out. They never, never hit civilians.’
And Pendel, because he loved her, felt it kindest to leave her with her faith, while El Chorrillo sobbed and glowed and fell apart under the repeated onslaughts of whatever weaponry the Pentagon needed to try out next.
‘Marta lives down there,’ he said.
But a woman fearing for her children fears for no one else, so when morning came Pendel took a stroll down the hill and heard a silence that in all his time in Panama City he had never heard before. It was suddenly clear to him that, under the terms of the ceasefire, all parties had agreed there would never again be air-conditioning or construction work or digging or dredging; and that all cars, lorries, school buses, taxis, garbage trucks, police cars and ambulances would be henceforth banished from God’s sight for ever more; and that no babies or mothers would be permitted to scream again on pain of death.