Law of the Lion

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John Merton set up his equipment in the small, neatly manicured park just beyond the Sheraton El Salvador, at a comfortable distance from the boxlike encroachments of the shantytown and even less formal street camps and cooking fires that had sprung up like mushrooms along the main roads to the central city.

He fiddled with the dial of his ghetto blaster, switching quickly from some piercing rhetoric about the forthcoming elections to a musical lament sung by a man who was complaining that his senorita had lost that lovin' feeling. Moving the dial a bit more toward 88.1 MHz, he got what he really wanted: talk radio that was no part of the ordinary broadcast band. Instead, Merton tuned in on an animated conversation among three men sitting at a sprawling sidewalk cafe about half a block away.

Dressed as a tourist, Merton had comfortable walking shoes, a new white guayabera shirt, and an auto everything camera. The shoeshine kids and the young girls selling packets of gum were swarming over him and that was just fine. Tourist they wanted, tourist they'd get. It gave him just the kind of cover he wanted. The tape cassette in the ghetto blaster was recording the conversation of his quarries, two contra captains wanting to «invest» some American humanitarian relief funds. They were joined by a skinny little guy who was showing them floor plans and a prospectus for a condo in Fort Lauderdale. Of course, if the two illustrious contradores were serious about wanting a completely different kind of climate than the tropics, why here was a splendid deal in Mammoth, California, that included an unlimited lift ticket during ski season.

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