The Tailor of Panama (19 page)

“The Silent Opposition.”

“I'll say they are.”

“They're holding their cards close to their chests.”

“Hell for? Democracy, isn't it? Why keep mum? Why not get up on their soapboxes, call out the students? Hell are they being silent
about
?”

“Let's just say Noriega taught them a sanitary lesson and they're not going to take the next one lying down. Nobody's ever going to put Mickie in prison again.”

“Mickie's their leader. Right?”

“Morally and practically, Mickie is their leader, Andy, though he'll never admit it and neither will his silent supporters, neither will his students that he's in touch with or his people on the other side of the bridge.”

“And Rafi stakes them.”

“All the way.” Pendel turned back into the room.

Osnard pulled his notebook from his lap, propped it on the back of the chair, resumed his writing. “List o' members anywhere? Got a platform? Set o' principles? What bonds 'em?”

“They're for cleaning up the country, one.” Pendel paused to let Osnard write. He was hearing Marta, loving her. He was seeing Mickie, sober and reconstructed in a new suit. His breast was filling with loyal pride. “They're for furthering Panama's identity as a single fledgling democracy when our American friends have finally upped sticks and left the scene if they ever do which is always doubtful, two. They're for educating the poor and needy, hospitals, improved university grants and a better deal for the poor farmers, rice and shrimp particularly, plus not selling off the country's assets to the highest bidder irregardless, including the Canal, three.”

“Lefties, are they?” Osnard suggested between bouts of composition, while he sucked the plastic helmet of his ballpoint with his little rosebud mouth.

“Not more than is decent and healthy, thank you, Andy. Mickie is left leaning, true. But moderation is his watchword plus he's got no time for Castro's Cuba or the Coms, no more has Marta.”

Osnard grimacing in concentration while he wrote. Pendel watching him with growing apprehension, wondering how to slow him down.

“I've heard quite a good joke about Mickie, if you want to know. He's
in vino veritas
but upside down. The more he drinks, the more he keeps silent in his opposition.”

“Tells you a whole lot when he's sober, though, doesn't he, our Mickie? You could hang him, some o' the stuff he's told you.”

“He's a friend, Andy. I don't hang my friends.”

“A
good
friend. And you've been a
good friend
to him. Maybe it's time you did something about it.”

“Like what?”

“Signing him up. Making an honest joe out o' him. Putting him on the payroll.”

“Mickie?”

“Not such a big deal. Tell him you've met this well-heeled Western philanthropist who admires his cause and would like to lend him a helping hand on the q.t. Don't have to say he's a Brit. Say he's a Yank.”

“
Mickie,
Andy?” Pendel whispered incredulously. “ ‘Mickie, would you like to be a spy?' Me go to Mickie and say that to him?”

“For money, why not? Fat man, fat salary,” Osnard said, as if stating an irrefutable law of espionage.

“Mickie wouldn't care for a Yank one bit,” said Pendel, wrestling with the enormity of Osnard's proposal. “The invasion got right under his skin. State terrorism is how he calls it, and he's not referring to Panama.”

Osnard was using the chair as a rocking horse, coaxing it back and forth with his ample buttocks.

“London's taken a shine to you, Harry. Doesn't always happen. Want you to spread your wings. Put a full-scale network together,
cover the board. Ministries, students, trade unions, Legislative Assembly, Presidential Palace, Canal and more Canal. They'll pay you responsibility allowance, incentives, generous bonuses, plus increased salary to set against your loan. Get Abraxas and his group aboard, we're home free.”

“
We,
Andy?”

Osnard's head remained gyroscopically still while the rump of him went on rocking. His voice sounded louder on account of being lowered.

“Me at your side. Guide, philosopher, chum. Can't handle it all alone. No one can. Too big a job.”

“I appreciate that, Andy. I respect it.”

“They'll pay subsources too. Goes without saying. Many as you've got. We could make a killing. You could. Long as it's cost-effective. Hell's your problem?”

“I haven't got one, Andy.”

“So?”

So Mickie's my friend, he was thinking. Mickie's opposed enough already and he doesn't need to oppose anymore. Silently or otherwise.

“I'll have to think about it, Andy.”

“Nobody pays us to think, Harry.”

“All the same, Andy, it's who I am.”

There was one more subject on Osnard's agenda for that evening, but Pendel didn't grasp this at first because he was remembering a warder called Friendly who was a master of the six-inch elbow jab to the balls. That's who you remind me of, he was thinking. Friendly.

“Thursday's the day Louisa brings work home, right?”

“Thursdays is correct, Andy.”

Dismounting thigh by thigh from his rocking horse, Osnard fished in a pocket and extracted an ornate gold-plated cigarette lighter.

“Present from a rich Arab customer,” he said, handing it to Pendel where he stood at the centre of the room. “London's pride. Try it.”

Pendel pressed the lever and it lit. He released the lever and the flame went out. He repeated the operation twice. Osnard took back the lighter, fondled its underparts, returned it.

“Now take a squiz through the lens,” he ordered with a magician's pride.

Marta's tiny flat had become Pendel's decompression chamber between Osnard and Bethania. She lay beside him, her face turned away from him. Sometimes she did that.

“So what are your students up to these days?” he asked.

“
My
students?”

“The boys and girls you and Mickie used to run with in the bad times. All those bomb throwers you were in love with.”

“I wasn't in love with them. I loved you.”

“What happened to them? Where are they now?”

“They got rich. Stopped being students. Went into the Chase Manhattan. Joined the Club Unión.”

“Do you see any of them?”

“They wave at me from their expensive cars sometimes.”

“Do they care about Panama?”

“Not if they bank abroad.”

“So who makes the bombs these days?”

“No one.”

“I get a feeling sometimes there's a sort of Silent Opposition brewing. Starting at the top and trickling down. One of those middle-class revolutions that will flare up one day and take over the country when nobody's expecting it. An officers' putsch without officers, if you get me.”

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, there is no Silent Opposition. There is profit. There is corruption. There is power. There are rich people and desperate
people. There are apathetic people.” Her learned voice again. The meticulous, bookish tone. The pedantry of the self-educated. “There are people so poor they can't get poorer without dying. And there's politics. And politics is the biggest swindle of them all. Is this for Mr. Osnard?”

“It would be if it was what he wanted to hear.”

Her hand found his and guided it to her lips and for a while she kissed it, finger by finger, saying nothing.

“Does he pay you a lot?” she asked.

“I can't supply him with what he wants. I don't know enough.” “Nobody knows enough. Thirty people decide what will happen in Panama. The other two and a half million guess.”

“So what would your old student friends be doing if they
hadn't
joined the Chase Manhattan and
weren't
driving shiny cars?” Pendel insisted. “What would they be doing if they'd stayed militant? What's logical? Given it's today, and they still wanted what they used to want for Panama?”

She pondered, coming slowly to what he was saying. “You mean, to put pressure on the government? Bring it to its knees?”

“Yes.”

“First we produce chaos. You want chaos?”

“I might. If it's necessary.”

“It is. Chaos is a precondition of democratic awareness. Once the workers discover they are unled, they will elect leaders from their own ranks and the government will be scared of revolution and resign. You wish the workers to elect their own leaders?”

“I'd like them to elect Mickie,” said Pendel, but she shook her head.

“Not Mickie.”

“All right, without Mickie.”

“We would go first to the fishermen. It was what we always planned but never did.”

“Why would you go to the fishermen?”

“We were students opposed to nuclear weapons. We were indignant that nuclear materials were passing through the Panama Canal.

We believed such cargoes were dangerous to Panama and an insult to our national sovereignty.”

“What could the fishermen do about it?”

“We would go to their unions and their gang bosses. If they refused us, we would go to the criminal elements on the waterfront who are willing to do anything for money. Some of our students were rich in those days. Rich students with a conscience.”

“Like Mickie,” Pendel reminded her, but again she shook her head.

“We would say to them: ‘Get out every trawler and smack and dinghy that you can lay your hands on, load them up with food and water, and take them to the Bridge of the Americas. Anchor them under the bridge and announce to the world that you mean to stay there. Many of the big cargo ships need a mile to slow down. After three days there will be two hundred ships waiting to pass through the Canal. After two weeks, a thousand. Thousands more will be turned away before they reach Panama, ordered to take different routes or go back to where they came from. There will be a crisis, the stock exchanges of the world will panic, the Yanquis will go crazy, the shipping industry will demand action, the balboa will collapse, the government will fall and no nuclear materials will ever again pass through the Canal.”

“I wasn't thinking about nuclear materials, to be honest, Marta.”

She raised herself on one elbow, her smashed face close to his.

“Listen. Panama today is already trying to prove to the world that it can run the Canal as well as the gringos. Nothing must interfere with the Canal. No strikes, no interruptions, no inefficiencies, no screw-ups. If the Panamanian government can't keep the Canal working properly, how can it steal the revenue, raise tariffs, sell off the concessions? The moment the international banking community starts to take fright, the
rabiblancos
will give us everything we ask. And we shall ask for
everything.
For our schools, our roads, our hospitals, our farmers and our poor. If they try to clear away our boats or shoot us or bribe us, we shall appeal to the nine thousand Panamanian workmen that it takes to run the Canal each day. And we shall ask
them: which side of the bridge do you stand? Are you Panamanian men, or are you Yanqui slaves? Strikes are a sacred right in Panama. Those who oppose them are pariahs. There are people in government today who argue that the labour laws of Panama should not apply to the Canal. Let them see.”

She was lying flat upon him, her brown eyes so close to his that they were all he saw.

“Thank you,” he said, kissing her.

“My pleasure.”

9

Louisa Pendel loved her husband with an intensity understood only by women who have known what it is like to have been born into the pampered captivity of bigoted parents and to have a beautiful elder sister four inches shorter than you who does everything right two years before you do it wrong, who seduces your boyfriends even if she doesn't go to bed with them, though usually she does, and obliges you to take the path of Noble Puritanism as the only available response.

She loved him for his steady devotion to herself and to the children, for being a striver like her father, and for rebuilding a fine old English firm that everyone had given up for dead, and for making chicken soup and
lockshen
on Sundays in his striped apron, and for his
kibbitzing,
which meant his joking around, and for setting the table for their special meals together, the best silver and china, cloth napkins, never paper. And for putting up with the tantrums which ran in her like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity; there was nothing she could do about them till they were safely over, or he had made love to her, which was by far the best solution, since she had all her sister's appetites, even if she lacked the looks and amorality to indulge them. And she was deeply ashamed that she could never match his jokes or give him the freed laughter he craved, because even with Harry to liberate it, her laughter still sounded like her mother's and so did her prayers, and her anger felt like her father's.

She loved the victim in Harry, and the determined survivor who had endured any privation rather than fall in with his wicked Uncle Benny and his criminal ways until the great Mr. Braithwaite came along to save him, just as Harry himself had later come along to save her from her parents and the Zone, and provide her with a new, free, decent life away from everything that till then had held her down. And she loved him as the lonely decider, struggling with conflicting beliefs until Braithwaite's wise counsel led him to a nondenominational morality so like the Cooperative Christianity championed by her mother and preached throughout Louisa's childhood from the pulpit of the Union Church in Balboa.

For all these mercies she thanked God and Harry Pendel, and cursed her sister, Emily. Louisa honestly believed she loved her husband in all his moods and varieties, but she had never known him like this, and she was sick with terror.