The visitor did not look like much compared to the muscular bulk of the former linebacker turned detective. He just stood in front of the desk and said, "You remember the teenager, turned to heroin and prostitution, gang raped and beaten to death four weeks back? I'm her father."

Alarm bells began to tinkle. The sergeant had risen and extended a hand. He withdrew it. Angry, vengeful citizens had his fullest sympathy and could expect nothing more. To any working cop, they are tiresome and can be dangerous.

"I'm sorry about that, sir. I can assure you that every effortÉ"

"At ease, Sergeant. I just want to know one thing. Then I'll leave you in peace."

"Mr. Dexter, I understand what you must be feeling, but I am not in a positionÉ"

The visitor had put his right hand in his jacket pocket and was pulling something out. Had front desk security screwed up? Was the man armed? The sergeant's own piece was an uncomfortable ten feet away in a desk drawer.

"What are you doing, sir?"

"I'm putting some bits of metal on your desk, Sergeant Austin."

He went on until he was finished. Sergeant Austin had been in the military, for they were of a similar age, but had never left the States. 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, Sergeant 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 gang. Very violent, very vicious. I know he did it, but I just don't have enough for an arrest warrant."

"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."

A hand pushed open the door of the small emporium of Oriental art off Madison at Twenty-eighth 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 demigods, 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. Major Nguyen did not hesitate for a second; he inclined his head. "Of course," he said, "please come with me."

15 The Settlement

The fast fishing boat *Chiquita* slipped away from the quay in the resort port of Golfito just before dawn and headed down the 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, secondhand but in excellent condition, farther up the Pan American Highway at Palmar Norte where the tourist had arrived via a local flight from San Jose.

The man had strolled up and down the pier, checking out the various moored gamefishing boats before making his choice and his approach. With the trail bike chained to a nearby lamppost 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. However, 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 accounted for were the two plastic drums of extra fuel strapped onto the stern of the fishing deck. He wanted to be run out of Costa Rican waters, around the headland at Punta Burica, and into Panama. His explanation that his family was vacationing in Panama City 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, Se-or 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 10:00 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 toward the land to their left, the eastern coast of the Burica Peninsula. "Now all is 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 indicated, 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. Twenty-five miles, a tad over two hours.

They were there by 1:00. The few fishing boats they had seen on the broad expanse of the bay had taken no notice of them.

The American wanted to cruise along the coast a hundred yards offshore. Five minutes later, east of Chiriqui Viejo, they saw a sandy beach with a brace of straw huts, the sort local fishermen use when they wish to stay overnight. That would mean a track leading inland. Not feasible for a vehicle, even an offroad, but manageable with a trail bike.

It took some grunting and pushing to get the bike down into the shallows; then the haversack was on the beach, and they parted company. Half at Golfito and half on delivery. The gringo paid up.

*He is a strange one*, thought Arias, but his dollars were as good as everyone else's when it came to feeding four hungry kids. Arias backed the *Chiquita* off the sand and headed out to sea. A mile offshore he emptied the two drums into his fuel tanks and gunned her south for the headland and home.

On the beach Cal Dexter took a screwdriver, unfastened the Costa Rican plates, and hurled them far into the sea. From his haversack he took the plates a Panamanian motorcycle would carry and screwed them on. His paperwork was perfect. Thanks to Mrs. Nguyen he had an American passport, but not in the name of Dexter, which already bore an entry stamp apparently applied a few days earlier at Panama City airport, plus a driver's licence to match.

His halting Spanish, picked up around the courts and remand centres of New York, where 20 percent of his clients were Hispanic, was not good enough to pretend to be Panamanian.

But a visiting American is allowed to ride upcountry to look for a fishing resort.

It was just over two years since, in December 1989, the United States had turned parts of Panama into an ashtray to topple and capture the dictator Noriega, and Dexter suspected most Panamanian cops had retained the basic message.

The narrow trail led back from the beach through dense rain forest to become, ten miles inland, a track. This turned into a dirt road with occasional farms, and there he knew he would find the Pan American Highway, that feat of engineering that runs from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia.