The Tailor of Panama (23 page)

“And you
preserve
it, General, sir! You
use
it!” he cried with passion. “Which if I may say without disrespect is not what we British commonly associate with our respected American friends.”

“Well, Harry, we're none of us quite what we appear, are we?” said the General with innocent contentment as he studied himself in the mirror.

“No, sir, we are not. Though what will become of all this when it falls into the hands of our gallant Panamanian hosts, I suppose no man can determine,” he added craftily in his role of listening post. “Anarchy and worse is what I hear from some of my more sensationally minded customers.”

The General was young in spirit and liked frank speaking. “Harry, it's a yo-yo. Yesterday they wanted us to go because we're bad colonial bears and they can't breathe while we're sitting on their heads. Today they want us to stay because we're the biggest employer in the country and if Uncle Sam walks out on them they'll suffer a crisis of confidence on the international money markets. Pack and unpack. Unpack and pack. Feels great, Harry. How's Louisa?”

“Thank you, General, Louisa is in the pink and will be all the more so for hearing that you enquired after her.”

“Milton Jenning was a fine engineer and a decent American. Sad loss to us all.”

They were trying a three-piece charcoal-grey alpaca, single breasted and priced at five hundred dollars, which was what Pendel had charged his first general a full nine years ago. He took a tuck in the waist. The General was fat-free and had the figure of an athletic god.

“I expect we'll be having a Japanese gentleman living up here next,” the listening post lamented, bending the General's arm at the elbow while they both watched the mirror. “
Plus
all his family and appendages and cook, I wouldn't wonder. You wouldn't think they'd heard of Pearl Harbor, some of them. It depresses me, frankly, General, the way the old order changeth, if you'll pardon me.”

The General's answer, if he ever got as far as thinking of one, was drowned by the joyous intervention of his wife.

“Harry Pendel, you leave my husband alone this
minute
,” she protested gaily, sweeping in from nowhere with a great vase of lilies in her arms. “He's all mine and you don't alter that suit by one gorgeous stitch. It's the sexiest thing I ever saw. I'm going to elope with him all over again right
now
. How's Louisa?”

They met in a neon-lit twenty-four-hour café beside the run-down oceanic railway terminus that was now an embarkation point for day trips on the Canal. Osnard sat slumped at a corner table, wearing a Panama hat. An empty glass of something stood at his elbow. In the week since Pendel had last seen him he had put on weight and years.

“Tea or one o' these?”

“I'll take the tea, please, Andy, if you don't mind.”

“Tea,” Osnard told the waitress rudely, passing a hand heavily through his hair. “And another o' these.”

“Thick night, then, Andy?”

“Operational.”

Through the window they could contemplate the decaying hardware of Panama's heroic age. Old railway dining cars, the upholstery ripped out of them by rats and vagrants, brass table lamps intact.
Rusted steam engines, turntables, carriages, tenders left to rot like the toys of a spoilt child. On the pavement, backpackers huddled under awnings, fought off beggars, counted sodden dollars, tried to decipher Spanish signs. It had been raining most of the morning. It was raining still. The restaurant stank of warm gasoline. Ships' horns moaned above the din.

“It's a chance meeting,” Osnard said, through a suppressed burp. “You were shopping, I was checking boat times.”

“Whatever was I buying?” Pendel asked, mystified.

“Fuck do I care?” Osnard took a swig of brandy while Pendel sipped his tea.

Pendel driving. They had agreed on the four-track because of the CD plates on Osnard's car. Wayside chapels marking places where spies and other motorists had been killed. Worried ponies with huge burdens driven by patient Indian families with bundles on their heads. A dead cow sprawled at a crossroads. A swarm of black vultures fighting for the best bits of it. A rear-wheel puncture announced by one deafening round of gunfire. Pendel changing the wheel while Osnard in his Panama hat squatted sullenly on the verge. A roadside restaurant out of town, hardwood tables under plastic awnings, chicken roasting on a barbecue. The rain stopped. Violent sunshine beat on an emerald lawn. Parrots screamed redand-green murder from a bell-shaped aviary. Pendel and Osnard sat alone except for two heavy men in blue shirts at a table the other side of the wooden deck.

“Know 'em?”

“No, Andy, I'm pleased to say I don't.”

And two glasses o' house white to wash their chicken down— hang on, make it a bottle, then fuck off and leave us in peace.

“They're jumpy is what they are,” Pendel began.

Osnard had propped his head between the splayed fingers of one hand while he took notes with the other.

“There's half a dozen of them round the General all the time, so I'm not getting him alone. There was a colonel there, tall fellow, kept drawing him aside. Getting him to sign things, murmuring in his ear.”

“See what he signed?” Osnard moved his head slightly to relieve the pain.

“Not while I'm fitting, Andy.”

“Catch any murmurs?”

“No, and I don't think you'd have caught many either, not while you were down there on your knees.” He took a sip of wine. “ ‘General,' I said, ‘if it's not convenient or I'm hearing what I oughtn't, tell me is all I ask. I'll not be offended; I'll come back another day.' He wouldn't have it. ‘Harry, you'll be pleased to stay right here where you belong. You're a raft of sanity in a stormswept sea.' ‘All right, then,' I said. ‘I'll stay.' Then his wife comes in and nothing is said. But there are looks that are worth a million words, Andy, and this was one of them. What I call a highly meaningful and pregnant look between two people who know each other well.”

Osnard writing at no great speed. “ ‘The General in charge o' Southern Command exchanged a pregnant look with his wife.'
That
should put London on red alert,” he remarked sourly. “General take a swipe at the State Department at all?”

“No, Andy.”

“Call 'em a bunch o' limp-wristed, overeducated faggots, bitch about the CIA college boys in their button-down collars straight out o' Yale?”

Pendel collects his memories. Judiciously.

“He did a
bit
, Andy. It was in the air, I'll put it that way.”

Osnard writing with slightly more enthusiasm.

“Lament America's loss o' power, speculate about the future ownership o' the Canal?”

“There was tension, Andy. The students were spoken of, and not with what I call respect.”

“Just his words—mind, ol' boy? I'll do the purple, you do the words.”

Pendel did his words as requested. “ ‘Harry,' he says to me— very quiet, this is—I'm worrying about his collar from the front— ‘My advice to you is, Harry, sell your shop and your house and get your wife and family out of this hellhole of a country while there's time. Milton Jenning was a great engineer. His daughter deserves better.' I was numb. I didn't speak. I was too moved. He asked me how old our children were, and he was highly relieved to discover they were not of university age, because he didn't like to think of Milton Jenning's grandchildren running in the streets with a lot of long-haired Commie bums.”

“Wait.”

Pendel waited.

“Okay. More.”

“Then he said I should take care of Louisa, and how she was a daughter worthy of her father on account of putting up with that duplicitous bastard Dr. Ernesto Delgado of the Canal Commission, God rot him. And the General's not a man for language, Andy. I was shaken. So would you be.”

“
Delgado
a bastard?”

“Correct, Andy,” said Pendel, recalling that gentleman's unhelpful posture at dinner in his house, as well as several years of having him shoved down his throat as a latter-day Braithwaite.

“Hell's he being duplicitous about?”

“The General didn't say, Andy, and it's not my place to ask.”

“Say anything about the U.S. military bases staying or going?”

“Not as such, Andy.”

“Hell does that mean?”

“There were jokes. Gallows humour. Remarks to the effect that it won't be long before the toilets start to back up.”

“Safety o' shipping? Arab terrorists threatening to paralyse the Canal? Essential for the Yanks to stay and continue the war on drugs, control the arms boys, keep the peace?”

Pendel modestly shook his head to each of these suggestions. “Andy, Andy, I'm a tailor, remember?”—and he bestowed a virtuous smile on a plume of ospreys swirling in a blue heaven.

Osnard ordered two glasses of aircraft fuel. Under its influence, his performance sharpened and specks of light reentered his small black eyes.

“All right. Come-to-Jesus time. What did Mickie say? Does he want to play or not?”

But Pendel wouldn't be hurried. Not on the matter of Mickie. He was telling the story in his own time about his own friend. He was cursing his own fluence and wishing very hard that Mickie had never put in an appearance at the Club Unión that night.

“He
may
want to play, Andy. If he does, it'll be on terms. He's got to put his thinking cap on.”

Osnard writing again. Osnard's sweat pattering on the plastic tablecloth.

“Where did you meet him?”

“At the Caesar's Park, Andy. In the long wide corridor outside the casino there. It's where Mickie holds court when he doesn't mind who he's with.”

Truth had briefly raised her dangerous head. Only the day before, Mickie and Pendel had sat in the very spot he described while Mickie heaped love and invective on his wife and mourned the grief of his children. And Pendel his faithful cellmate sympathised, careful to say nothing that would push Mickie either way.

“Pitch him the eccentric millionaire philanthropist bit?”

“I did, Andy, and he took note.”

“Tell him a nationality?”

“I fudged, Andy. Like you said to. ‘My friend is Western, highly democratic but not American,' I said. ‘And that's as far as I am prepared to go.' ‘Harry boy,' he said—which is what he calls me: Harry boy—‘if he's English I'm halfway there. Kindly remember I'm an Oxford man and a former high officer of the Anglo-Panamanian
Society.' ‘Mickie,' I said, ‘trust me, I can go no further. My eccentric friend has a certain quantity of money, and he's prepared to put that quantity at your disposal, provided he's persuaded of the rightness of your cause, and I'm not talking loose change. If someone's selling Panama down the Canal,' I said, ‘if it's jackboots and salute the Führer in the streets again, and upsetting the chances of a small gallant young nation as she sets out on her maiden voyage towards democracy, then my eccentric friend is there to help any way he can with his millions.' ”

“How'd he take it?”

“ ‘Harry boy,' he said, ‘I've got to level with you. It's the money that talks to me at this moment, because I'm running on empty. It's not the casinos have ruined me or what I give to my beloved students and the people who live the other side of the bridge. It's my trusted sources, it's the bribes I pay them, it's my out-of-pocket. Not just in Panama but Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Tokyo, and I don't know where else. I'm skint, and that's the bare-cheeked truth.' ”

“Who does he have to bribe? Hell's he buying? Don't get it.”

“He didn't tell me, Andy, and I didn't ask. He went off at a tangent, which is his way. Gave me a lot of stuff about the carpetbaggers at the back door and the politicians filling their pockets with the Panamanian people's birthright.”

“How about Rafi Domingo?” Osnard asked with the belated petulance that comes over people when they offer money, then find their offer is accepted. “Thought Domingo was staking him.”

“No longer, Andy.”

“Hell not?”

Truth once more came cautiously to Pendel's aid.

“As of a few days ago, Señor Domingo has ceased to be what you might call a welcome guest at Mickie's table. What was evident to all has finally become evident to Mickie too.”

“You mean he's rumbled his old lady and Rafi?”

“Correct, Andy.”

Osnard digested this. “Buggers wear me out,” he complained. “Plots here, plots there, talk o' the big sellout, putsches round the
corner, silent oppositions, students on the march. Hell are they
opposing
, Christ's sake? What
for
? Why can't they come clean?”

“That's exactly what I said to him, Andy. ‘Mickie,' I said. ‘My friend will not invest in an enigma. For as long as there's a very big secret out there which you know and my friend doesn't,' I said, ‘his money's going to stay in his wallet.' I was firm, Andy. With Mickie you have to be. He's iron. ‘
You
deliver your plot, Mickie,' I said, ‘and
we'll
deliver our philanthropy.' My words,” he added while Osnard puffed and wrote and the sweat went tap-tap on the table.

“How'd he take it?”

“He
drucken
ed himself, Andy.”

“He
what
?”

“Went all dark and nobody. I had to force the words out of him the same as an interrogator. ‘Harry boy,' he says to me, ‘we're men of honour, you and me, so I won't mince my words either.' He was fired up. ‘If you ask me
when,
I shall answer you
never.
Never
never
!' ” The heat in Pendel's voice was very lifelike. You knew at once that he had been there, felt the Abraxas passion. “ ‘Because
never
will I divulge the single slightest detail passed to me by my highly secret sources until I have cleared it with each and every one of them down the line.' ” His voice fell and became a solemn promise. “ ‘I shall then furnish your friend with an order of battle of my movement, plus a statement of its aims and dreams, plus a manifesto of intent should we ever win first prize in the great lottery of life, plus all requisite facts and figures regarding the secret machinations of this government—which are in my view diabolical—subject to certain copper-bottomed assurances.' ”