26
The unknown is a beast of unspeakable power. When you’re deprived of your freedom—when your future is placed entirely in the hands of people who exist for the purpose of tormenting you—the unknown takes on a life as surely and as treacherously as the most venomous snake. As they led Kurt from Correa’s office into the bowelsof this horrific place, he could hear the beast’s growl and feel its hot breath on the back of his neck.
The ghastly faces of those men he’d seen at the DENI jail and here at Modelo peering out of the windows would not leave Kurt’s imaginationas guards led him up a flight of concrete steps toward God only knew what.
The guts of Modelo Prison vibrated with a misery that was palpable,reverberated with a level of noise that he’d never experienced. There were no discernable voices, nor audible screams, yet the rumble was distinctly human. If Kurt had been inclined to supernatural thoughts, he might have succumbed to visions of lifeless spirits who continued to linger long after their earthly bodies had given in and given up to the tortures of so many decades without hope.
Kurt had actually seen pictures. He couldn’t remember the context, but he distinctly remembered pictures from the inside of Modelo Prison where squalid cells were packed with dozens of men wearing the tatteredremains of the clothes that had no doubt fit them on the day they were arrested, but which now hung on their emaciated bodies like burialshrouds. He remembered the images of the hammocks these desperatemen used as beds, and somehow, somewhere, he remembered hearing how easy it was to kill a man in his sleep under those circumstances.He remembered thinking as he read the article what an impossibilityit would be to close one’s eyes in such conditions.
And here he was. His future had arrived, and it brought with it the combined stench of excrement, sweat, and his own fear.
He tried not to show the terror, tried not to give these assholes the satisfaction, but he knew that it had to be obvious. It
had
to be.
The concrete steps through the middle of the prison took hard turns at every landing. The heat of the place was stifling, getting progressivelyworse with each step toward its center.
On the third floor, they turned, and the guard led him down a hallwayof heavy closed doors that he would later come to learn were the officers’ quarters and interrogation rooms, stopping finally in front of a twelve-by-twelve-foot cell whose front wall was constructed of iron bars. The guard produced a large key, removed the heavy-duty padlock from its hasp, and ushered Kurt into his new home. Five seconds later, the door closed, the lock slipped home again, and he was alone.
A filthy thin foam pad on the floor would serve as his bed. There were no other furnishings in the room. In an odd twist, though, his suitcase lay on the floor waiting for him, as if placed by some bellman in a twisted theme hotel.
At the rear of the cell and off to the left, he found a toilet and shower area. He had his own little concrete apartment.
His suitcase had been ransacked, but the basics remained. He still had toiletries, socks and underwear, and the kinds of clothes that one would wear to visit a dying relative and to make plans with governmentoperatives. What he didn’t have were clothes that were appropriatefor imprisonment in a tropical hellhole.
The windows in his cell—there were three of them in all, along the back wall of his cell and his lavatory, looked out onto the prison yard, where inmates walked, played basketball, or talked among themselves. On the inside of the far wall—the wall that faced Kurt’s cell from fifty yards away—someone had painted a lengthy quote from Manuel Noriegatouting the importance of a fair judicial system to the well-being of a civilized society. Next to that mural-sized quotation, someone had painted the words “Jesus Saves.”
It was hard to tell by looking what the population of the prison was, but it had to be in the hundreds. The yard, with its basketball courts and wandering spaces, was perpetually crowded in the way that New York subways were crowded in rush hour, people jammed shoulderto shoulder in some corners as they tried to absorb the best of what could barely be described as fresh air in a place like this.
Looking out the front of his cell, toward the concrete hallway, he could see nothing but a blank wall. As he moved closer to the bars, however, and when he pressed his head against them, he could see wooden doors on the other side of the hall. They were closed now, but he could hear muffled voices.
And that was it; that was his life until something happened or someone did something to change it. Truly, for good or for ill, his entirelife lay in the hands of others. He’d done all he could to screw things up of his own volition, thank you very much.
He wandered to the part of the cell that seemed farthest from the bars, pressed his back to the wall, and slid till he sat on the floor, hugginghis knees in front of him. It was time to take inventory on the number of lives he had succeeded in screwing up and the depths to which they had been screwed.
A desperate sadness washed over him in that moment, a sense of helplessness that would not be denied. Kurt felt the tears coming, but he willed them away for another time. For the nighttime. Under the circumstances, tears were probably good, and they probably could not be denied, but he would save them for the privacy brought by darkness.
Dignity above all else, he thought. They had his body, and one day they might conquer his mind, but denying the bastards his dignity was the last battle over which he had complete control, and he wasn’t about to surrender without one hell of a fight.
Time in prison does not pass. It creeps. One moment evolves into anotherwithout form or meaning.
After the first couple of days, Kurt came to envy those hopeless men crowded into the prison yard. They
knew
how long they would have to endure their confinement, and they had other human beings with whom to share the pressures of their incarceration. For Kurt, there was only the vividness of the present, the hopelessness of the future, and the uselessness of the past. He’d cast his whole life aside in pursuit of a ridiculous plan that had never really had a chance to succeed. Now, it was time to atone for his foolishness, and the penalty was unending solitude and the terrible depression that solitude brought. He had no lawyer, and they had yet to officially level charges against him. He had no way of knowing in those early days, but it would be months before charges were filed, and when they were, they would be as meaningless as the pretense of justice under the thumb of Noriega’s dictatorship.
Interrogations continued after Kurt arrived in Modelo Prison, but the character of them changed. No longer pressed to find out who the hell he was, the PDF and the DENI were more interested in filling in the details. Where were all the transmitters located? Where were they purchased? And, of course, who were his compatriots? On that latter point, he continued to maintain that he had acted alone.
The interrogations happened mostly at night now, sometime betweenmidnight and four in the morning, and despite the imposing threat of violence, no violence was inflicted on him. Instead, they told him over and over again that his family would suffer as a result of what he had done and that the suffering was made all the worse by his refusal to cooperate. They told him that he would be forgotten here by the government they thought he had once served, and once forgotten, they would be able to do anything to him that they wanted. Major Moreno—the same man who had run the search of Kurt’s house on the night of his arrest—conducted all the interrogations. Professional in his demeanor, but with violence lurking behind every expression and word, Moreno would shout and blather, but there seemed to be a line he would never cross, and that was the line that separated Kurt from physical harm.
It was hard not to be swayed by their words and threats. Aloneness is a powerful motivator, and no place is as lonely as a jail cell.
The good news—if there was such a thing under the circumstances—was the fact that Kurt’s primary guard, a Lieutenant Dominguez, wasn’t a bad guy at all. A career civil servant in the PDF, Dominguez spouted none of the political bullshit of the Noriega dynasty and kept his harassment of Kurt to a minimum. He seemed to have sympathy, in fact, for the misery of Kurt’s plight, and while he was no pushover, he was no zealot, either. He greeted his charge every morning with a friendly hello and a smile that seemed genuine. He had a scowl in his kit bag as well, of course, but he seemed somehow uncomfortable usingit.
On the fifth day of Kurt’s incarceration, Dominguez came to his door in the middle of the day and announced that he had a visitor. They led him out of his cell and down the hall to a small dispensary, a cell that was twice the size of his own, but outfitted with a sheet-drapedtable and various jars of medical supplies. He was there for maybe a minute when two men entered, one in an Air Force uniform and the other in civilian attire. Kurt instantly recognized the man in the uniform as Dr. Ruffer, the lieutenant colonel who had conducted the brief exam during the day of his perp walk.
Just seeing an American uniform and a friendly face made Kurt’s spirits soar. “Hello, Doctor,” he said, beaming. “Nice to see you again. I thought maybe they reneged.” When he stepped forward to shake Ruffer’s hand, neither Dominguez nor the tall dour-faced black man who accompanied him from time to time made any effort to intervene.
“Hello, Mr. Muse,” Jim said. “It’s nice to see you as well. I’m just sorry for the venue. Nobody reneged. We just got off to a slow start.” He gestured to the small man in civilian clothes who stood next to him, “This is Doctor Marcos Ostrander, a lawyer with the U.S. Army South—USARSO. He’ll be accompanying me from time to time as I make my visits.”
Kurt shook his hand. “Are you a medical doctor?”
Marcos smiled and shook his head. “No, no such luck. I’m just a lawyer.”
“
My
lawyer?”
Marcos shook his head. “Actually, no. At least not for the long term. We’re having a hard time finding a lawyer in Panama with balls big enough to take on your case. But we’re working on that.”
“What does ‘working on that’ mean?”
Jim Ruffer stepped in to change the subject. “Let’s get to the businessof your physical examination,” he said. He ushered Kurt toward the exam table and pulled the privacy curtain closed. Beyond the curtain,Kurt could hear Ostrander begin chatting up the guards. “Take your shirt off, please, and your pants, down to your underwear.”
As Kurt complied, and a routine physical exam commenced, Ruffer asked, “How are you really? Are you being treated well?”
“I’m fine,” Kurt said. “The food is pretty awful, but I’m makingdo.”
Ruffer nodded and applied the blood pressure cuff. “I see. Do you need anything? Anything that we can bring you?”
“Shorts,” Kurt said, without a moment’s hesitation. “They left me my suitcase, but I don’t have any clothes suited to the heat. Running shorts would be great.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Blood pressure done, Ruffer moved on to the poking and prodding part of the exam.
“And I want you to tell my family that I’m okay. That’s very importantto me.”
“I understand that,” Ruffer said, lowering his voice even further. “That’s why I brought Doctor Ostrander along. He’s more or less the conduit for communication with your family. When I’m done, you’ll have an opportunity to speak with him. You tell him anything and everything he wants to know, okay? Anything that’s on your mind.”
The physical examination lasted only a few minutes, and when it was done, Ruffer announced that he had continuing concerns about his patient’s health and that the frequency of the visits needed to be maintained. He started to make quite a speech, actually, and as he did, Ostrander moved in close to Kurt and began chatting.
“Doctor Ruffer told you who I am?”
Kurt nodded. “You’re my conduit.”
“Exactly. I’m your voice to the outside world. You need something, you tell me. If I can’t be here for some reason, you tell Doctor Ruffer. The United States government is plenty pissed off that you’re being held in here without charges being filed, and we’re doing everything we can to get you out. These assholes are going to mess with your head in a thousand different ways telling you otherwise—it’s what they do—but you have to always remember that we’re out there working for you.”
Kurt didn’t know why this was as big a shock as it turned out to be. “Thank you,” he said. “I told the doctor that I want my family to be reassured that I’m doing all right.”
“I’ll do that. You know that they’ve all been resettled, right? All of them are okay. Perfectly safe.”
Actually, he hadn’t been told that in as many words, and the news delighted him. “Where are they?”
“Safe,” Ostrander said. “In the States. I’m not sure it’s prudent to go into a lot more detail than that.”
Okay, that was fine. Kurt understood that. “Listen, if you talk to Annie—”
“
When
,” Ostrander corrected. “
When
I talk to Annie.”
Kurt smiled. He liked this guy. “Okay, when you talk to Annie, I want you to tell her that we have a ten-thousand-dollar certificate of deposit in the bank down here. If she needs money, she should cash that in. Tell her—”