Sixty years earlier, Pierre knew, when the Americans built a railroad across Panama, there were so many deaths among the laborers—men from China and the Indies—that the railroad company, without space to bury them all, pickled the bodies and shipped the cadavers to medical schools to use for research. These days, however, the bodies were placed in plain pine coffins and loaded on trains. If the bodies inside the coffins were white, the trains took them to the grassy cemetery at Ancón. If they were colored, they were taken instead to a place called Monkey Hill.
