The Tailor of Panama (18 page)

The approaching posse was a dozen strong and polyglot. Excited snatches of Spanish, Japanese, and English resounded above the clatter of impatient shoes on parquet. The posse moved at politician speed: much bustle and circumstance, chattering like schoolkids freed from detention. Uniform was dark suits, the tone self-congratulatory, the formation, Pendel noticed as it thundered closer, arrowhead. And at its point, elevated a foot or two above the ground, floated a larger-than-life-size embodiment of the Sun King himself, the All-Pervading, the Shining One, the Divine Misser of Hours, dressed in a P & B black jacket, striped trousers and a pair of Ducker's black calf town with the toecaps.

A roseate glow, part sanctity and part gastronomy, suffused the presidential cheeks. The full head of hair was silvered, the lips were small and pink and moist, as if newly snatched from the maternal
breast. The neat cornflower eyes were shining in the afterglow of conference achieved. Reaching Pendel, the posse pulled to a ragged halt, and there was business and a bit of shoving in the ranks as some kind of order was pragmatically arrived at. His Sublimity strode forward, turned on his heel and faced his guests. An aide labelled Marco placed himself at his master's side. A virgin in Brownie costume joined them. Her name was not Helen but Juanita.

One by one the guests ventured forward to shake the Immortal One's hand and take their leave. His Radiance had a word of encouragement for each. If there had been gift-wrapped favours to take home to their mummies, Pendel would not have been surprised. Meanwhile the great spy is torturing himself with fears about the contents of his suitcase. What if the finishing hands have packed the wrong suit? He sees himself drawing back the lid to reveal Hannah's Bo-Peep costume that the Cuna women have run up for Carlita Rudd's fancy-dress birthday party: flowered bell skirt, frilly hat, blue pantaloons. He longs to take a reassuring look, but dare not. The farewells continued. Two of the guests, being Japanese, were small. The President was not. Some handshakes took place on the slope.

“It's a deal, then. Golf on Saturday,” His Supremacy promised, in the grey monotone so beloved of his children. A Japanese gentleman was promptly convulsed with laughter.

Other fortunates were singled out—“Marcel, thank you for your support, we shall meet again in Paris, then! Paris in the spring!— Don Pablo, be sure to give my greetings to your distinguished President and tell him I shall value the opinion of his National Bank”—until the last of the group had departed, the doors closed, the shaft of light vanished, and there was no one in the room but His Immensity, one suave aide named Marco and the virgin named Juanita. And one wall with a suitcase.

Together, the trio turned and advanced down the room, with the Sun King at its centre. Its destination was the presidential
sanctum. The doors to it were not three feet from where Pendel stood. He hoisted a smile and, suitcase in hand, took a step forward. The silvered head lifted and turned in his direction, but the cornflower eyes saw only wall. The trio swept past him, the sanctum doors closed. Marco returned.

“Are you the tailor?”

“I am indeed, Señor Marco, and at His Excellency's service.”

“Wait.”

Pendel waited, as must all who only stand and serve. Years passed. The doors opened again. “Make haste,” Marco ordered.

Ask about his missing hours in Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

A carved gold screen has been erected in one corner of the room. Gilded gesso bows adorn each fretted corner. Gold roses tumble down the staves. Backlit by the window, His Transparency stands regally before it in his black jacket and striped trousers. The presidential palm is as soft as an old lady's but larger. Making contact with its silken cushions, Pendel has a memory of his Auntie Ruth chopping chicken for the Sunday soup while Benny sings “Celeste Aïda” at the upright piano.

“Welcome back, sir, after your arduous tour,” Pendel murmurs through a chicane of glottal obstructions.

But it is uncertain whether the World's Greatest Leader receives the full force of this strangled greeting, because Marco has handed him a cordless red telephone and he is already speaking into it.

“Franco? Don't bother me with that stuff. Tell her she needs a lawyer. See you at the reception tonight. Catch my ear.”

Marco removes the red telephone. Pendel opens his suitcase. Not a Bo-Peep costume but a half-made tail suit with discreetly reinforced breast panels to bear the weight of twenty orders sleeps safely in its scented tissue coffin. The virgin makes a silent exit as the Master of the Earth takes up his post behind the gold screen with its mirrored interior. It is an ancient artefact of the palace.

The silver head so beloved of its people vanishes and reappears as the presidential trousers are removed.

“If His Excellency would be so kind,” Pendel murmurs.

A presidential hand appears round the side of the gold screen. Pendel lays the basted black trousers over the presidential forearm. Arm and trousers disappear. More phones ring.
Ask about his missing hours.

“It's the Spanish ambassador, Excellency,” Marco calls from the desk. “Wants a private audience.”

“Tell him tomorrow night after the Taiwanese.”

Pendel stands face-to-face with the Lord of the Universe: the Grand Master of Panama's political chessboard, the man who holds the keys to one of the world's two greatest gateways, determines the future of world trade and the balance of global power in the twenty-first century. Pendel inserts two fingers inside the presidential waistband while Marco announces another caller, one Manuel.

“Tell him Wednesday,” the President retorts over the top of the screen.

“Morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon,” the President replies.

The presidential waistline is elusive. If the crotch is right, the trouser length is wrong. Pendel raises the waist. The trousers rise above the presidential silk sock line, so that for a moment he looks like Charlie Chaplin.

“Manuel says afternoon is okay as long as it's only nine holes,” Marco warns his master severely.

Suddenly nothing stirs. What Pendel described to Osnard as a blessed truce amid the fray has descended over the sanctum. Nobody speaks. Not Marco, not the President or his many telephones. The great spy is kneeling, pinning the presidential left trouser leg, but his wits do not desert him.

“And may I enquire of His Excellency with respect whether we were able to relax during our highly triumphant Far Eastern tour at
all, sir? Some sport perhaps? A walk? A little shopping, if I may make so bold?”

And still no phone rings, nothing disturbs the blessed truce while the Keeper of the Keys to Global Power considers his reply.

“Too tight,” he announces. “You make me too tight, Mr. Braithwaite. Why won't you let your President breathe, you tailors?”

“ ‘Harry,' he says to me, ‘those parks they've got in Paris, I'd do the same for Panama tomorrow if it wasn't for the property developers and the Communists.' ”

“Wait.” Osnard turned a page of his notebook, writing hard.

They were on the fourth floor of a three-hour hotel called the Paraiso, in a bustling part of town. Across the road an illuminated Coca-Cola sign turned off and on, now flooding the room with red flames, now leaving it in darkness. From the corridor came the stampede of arriving and departing couples. Through the adjoining walls, groans of chagrin or delight and the accelerating thump of eager bodies.

“He didn't say,” said Pendel cautiously. “Not in as many words.”

“Don't paraphrase, mind? Just give it me the way he said it.” Osnard licked a thumb and turned a page.

Pendel was seeing Dr. Johnson's summerhouse on Hampstead Heath, the day he went there with Auntie Ruth for the azaleas.

“ ‘Harry,' he says to me, ‘that park in Paris, I wish I could remember its name. There was a little hut there with a wood roof, just us and the bodyguards and the ducks.' The President loves his Nature. ‘And it was there in that hut that history was made. And one day, if all goes according to plan, there'll be a plaque on the wooden wall, telling the world that on this very spot the future prosperity, well-being and independence of the fledgling state of Panama was determined, plus the date.' ”

“Say who he was talking to? Japs, Frogs, Chinese? Didn't just sit there and talk to the flowers, did he?”

“Not as such, Andy. There were clues.”

“Give 'em to me”—licking his thumb again, a small slurp.

“ ‘Harry, you'll have to protect me on this one, but the brilliance of the Oriental mind is a total revelation to me, plus the French aren't far behind.' ”

“Say what kind of Oriental?”

“Not as such.”

“Japanese? Chinese? Malaysian?”

“Andy, I fear you are trying to put thoughts into my head which were not there before.”

No sound except for the shriek of traffic, the clank and heave of air conditioners, the canned music to drown the clank and heave. Latin voices yelling above the music. Osnard's ballpoint speeding over the pages of his notebook.

“And Marco didn't like you?”

“He never did, Andy.”

“Why not?”

“Palace courtiers don't like Turco tailors enjoying one-to-one powwows with their bosses, Andy. They don't like, ‘Marco, Mr. Pendel and I haven't spoken for an age and we've got a lot to catch up with, so be a good lad and go and stand the other side of that mahogany door till I give you a shout'—do they?”

“Is he a poof?”

“Not so far as my knowledge extends, Andy, but I haven't asked him and it's not my business.”

“Take him out to dinner. Show him a time, give him a cut rate on a suit. Sounds like the sort o' chap we ought to have on our side. Anything about traditional anti-American feeling raising its head among the Japs?”

“Zero, Andy.”

“Japs as the world's next superpower?”

“No, Andy.”

“Natural leader o' the emerging industrial states?—still no?

Jap-American animosity?—Panama's got to choose between the
devil and the deep blue sea?—Pres feels like the ham in the sandwich—that type o' thing?—no?”

“Nothing above the normal in that regard, Andy; not on Japan; no. Well, there was just the one reference, Andy, now that it comes back to me.”

Osnard brightened.

“ ‘Harry,' he says to me, ‘all I pray is that I never never
never
again have to sit down in a room with Japs one side of the table and Yanks the other, because keeping the peace between them puts years onto my life, as you can see from my poor grey hairs,' although I'm not sure that hair's all his own, to be frank. I think it's helped.”

“Chatty, was he?”

“Andy, it was pouring out of him. Once he's got that screen round him, there's no holding him. And if he ever gets onto Panama as all the world's pawn, it's the morning gone.”

“How about his missing hours in Tokyo?”

Pendel was shaking his head. Gravely. “I'm sorry, Andy. There we have to draw a veil,” he said, and turned his head towards the window in stoical refusal.

Osnard's pen had stopped in mid-caress. The Coca-Cola sign across the road switched him on and off.

“Hell's the matter with you?” he demanded.

“He's my third president, Andy,” Pendel replied to the window.

“So?”

“So I won't do it. I can't.”

“Can't do what, fuck's sake?”

“Reconcile it with my conscience. Grass.”

“Are you out o' your mind? This is gold dust, man. We're talking major, major bonus. Tell me what Pres said to you about his missing Japanese hours while he was trying on his bloody knickers!”

It took Pendel much heart searching to overcome his reticence. But he managed it. His shoulders fell, he loosened, his gaze returned to the room.

“ ‘Harry,' he says to me, ‘if your customers ever ask you why I had such a light schedule in Tokyo, you're please to tell them that while my wife was inspecting a silk factory with the Empress, I was having myself my first ever piece of Japanese tail'—which is not an expression I would use, Andy, as you know, neither in the shop, nor in the home—‘because in that way, Harry, my friend,' he says to me, ‘you will raise my stock in certain circles here in Panama, while putting other elements off the scent regarding the real nature of my activities and the highly secret talks I was conducting on the side, for the ultimate good of Panama despite what many may think.' ”

“Hell did he mean by that?”

“He was referring to certain threats that have been made against his person and suppressed in order not to alarm the public.”

“His
words,
Harry, ol' boy, mind? Sound like the bloody
Guardian
on a wet Monday.”

Pendel was serene.

“There were no
words,
Andy. Not as such.
Words
were not needed.”

“Explain,” said Osnard while he wrote.

“The President wishes a special pocket inside the left breast of all his suits, to be added in total confidence. I'm to get the length of barrel from Marco. ‘Harry,' he says, ‘don't think I'm being dramatic and never tell it to a living person. What I'm doing for the new emerging infant state of Panama which I love will cost me blood. I'm saying no more.' ”

From the street below, the jackass laughter of drunks rose at them like mockery.

“One king-sized bonus assured,” Osnard said, closing his notebook. “What's the latest on Brother Abraxas?”

The same stage, a different setting. Osnard had found a flimsy bedroom chair and was sitting astride it with his podgy thighs spread and the backrest rising from his crotch.

“They're hard to define, Andy,” Pendel warned, pacing, hands behind his back.

“Who are, ol' boy?”