The big-boned, but skinny old man in the worn gown, lay long on the fat pillow and thin plastic blue liner of an anonymous Miami hospital bed, the name tag sliding down his wrist, the shock of thick white hair and hard green eyes small set in the sallow, splotchy face framed by wild bushy brows. Tubes extended from his nostrils and other lines jutted under the sheets.
He smiled benignly, showing discoloured teeth in the most recent public photograph, but the square right jaw is noticeably lopsided, permanently jarred an inch higher from a blast of bullets in a botched 1990 assassination attempt in Guatemala, twisting torpid, torn tongue and skewing slurred speech.
