The Tailor of Panama (31 page)

“I know he's hard! They're all hard!
You
know he's hard! The Top Floor knows he's hard. Geoff knows he's hard. Certain private investor friends of mine know he's hard. He's been hard from day one. He'll get harder as we come up to the post. My God, if I knew of a better hole, I'd go to it! There was a fellow in the Falklands contest took us for a fortune and never delivered a damn thing.”

“It's got to be on results.”

“Go on.”

“A bigger retainer will only encourage him to rest on his oars.”

“I agree. Totally. He'd laugh at us. That's what they do. Shylock us and laugh.”

“Bigger bonuses, on the other hand, wake him up. We've seen it before and we saw it tonight.”

“We did, did we?”

“You want to see him shovelling the stuff into his briefcase.”

“Oh my God.”

“On the other hand, he
has
given us Alpha and Beta and the students, he
has
put the Bear on a semi-conscious footing, he
has
recruited Abraxas to a point, and he
has
recruited Marco.”

“And we've paid him every inch of the way. Handsomely. And what have we had for it to date? Promises. Chicken feed. ‘Stand by for the Big One.' It makes me sick, Andrew. Sick.”

“I put that point to him fairly energetically, if I may say so, sir.”

Luxmore's voice softened immediately. “I'm sure you did, Andrew. If I implied otherwise, I am truly sorry. Go on. Please.”

“My
personal
conviction—” Osnard resumed, with enormous diffidence—

“That's the only one that counts, Andrew!”

“—is that we work towards incentives only. If he delivers, we pay. The same goes, according to him, if he delivers his wife.”

“Holy Mother, Andrew! He
said
that to you? He
sold
his wife to you?”

“Not yet, but she's on the market.”

“Not in twenty years of this Service, Andrew. Not in all its history has a man sold his wife to us for gold.”

Osnard had a special gear for talking money, a lower, more fluid engine tone.

“I'm suggesting we put him on a regular bonus for every subsource he recruits, to include his wife. The bonus to be calculated as a proportion of the subsource's salary. A flat rate. If she earns a bonus, he earns a piece of it.”

“Additional?”

“Absolutely. There's also the unsolved question of what Sabina should pay her students.”

“Don't spoil them, Andrew! What about Abraxas?”

“If and when the Abraxas organisation delivers the conspiracy, the same commission is payable to Pendel, calculated as 25 percent of what we pay Abraxas and his group by way of bonus.”

Now Luxmore made the silence.

“Did I hear
if and when
? What am I hearing there exactly, Andrew?”

“I'm sorry, sir. I just can't help wondering whether Abraxas isn't stringing us along. Or Pendel is. Forgive me. It's late.”

“Andrew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen to me, Andrew. That's an order. There
is
a conspiracy. Don't lose heart merely because you're tired. Of
course
there is a conspiracy. You believe it, I believe it. One of the greatest opinion makers in the
world
believes it. Personally. Profoundly. The best brains in Fleet Street believe it, or they very soon will. A conspiracy is out there, it is being cobbled together by an evil inner circle of the Panamanian élite, it centres on the Canal and we shall find it! Andrew?” Alarm, suddenly. “Andrew!”

“Sir?”

“Scottie, if you don't mind. We've done with ‘sir.' Are you at peace in your heart, Andrew? Are you under strain? Are you comfortable? My goodness me, I feel an ogre, never enquiring after your personal
well-being amid all this. I am not without influence in the upper corridors these days, nor yet across the river. It saddens me when a diligent and loyal young man asks nothing for himself in these materialist times.”

Osnard gave the kind of embarrassed laugh that loyal and diligent young men give when they are embarrassed.

“I could do with some sleep if you've got any to spare.”

“Get some, Andrew. Now. As long as you like. That's an order. We need you.”

“Will do, sir. Good night.”

“Good morning, Andrew. I mean it now. And when you wake up, you'll hear that conspiracy loud and clear again, resounding like a hunting horn in your ears, and you'll spring from your bed and ride out in search of it, I know you will. I've been there. I've heard it too. We went to war for it.”

“Good night, sir.”

But the diligent young spymaster's day was far from over.
File while your memory is hot,
the trainers had dinned into him ad nauseam. Returning to the strong room he unlocked a bizarre metal casket to which he alone possessed the combination and extracted from it a red handbound volume similar in weight and portent to a ship's log and encompassed by a kind of iron chastity belt the two ends of which met in a second lock which Osnard also opened. Returning to his office he set the book on his desk beside his reading light, next to the bottle of Scotch and his notes and tape recorder from the shabby briefcase.

The red book was his indispensable aid to creative report writing. In its hugely secret pages, areas of Head Office's outstanding ignorance, known otherwise as the analysts' Black Holes, were obligingly listed for the convenience of intelligence gatherers. And what analysts didn't know, in Osnard's simple logic, analysts couldn't check. And what they couldn't check they couldn't bloody well carp about. Osnard, like many new writers, had discovered he
was unexpectedly sensitive to criticism. For two hours without a break, Osnard reshaped, polished, honed, and rewrote until
BUCHAN
's latest intelligence material fitted like perfectly turned pegs into the analysts' Black Holes. A lapidary tone, an everwatchful scepticism, an extra doubt raised here and there added to the air of authenticity. Till at last, confident of his handiwork, he telephoned his cypher clerk, Shepherd, summoned him to the embassy immediately and, on the principle that messages dispatched at unsociable hours are more impressive than their daytime fellows, presented him with a hand-coded
TOP SECRET BUCHAN
telegram for immediate transmission.

“Only wish I could share it with you, Shep,” said Osnard in his We Dive at Dawn voice, observing how Shepherd gazed wistfully at the unintelligible groups of numbers.

“Me too, Andy, but when it's need-to-know, it's need-to-know, isn't it?”

“Suppose it is,” Osnard conceded.

We'll send out old Shep, Personnel had said. Keep young Osnard on the straight and narrow.

Osnard drove but not to his apartment. He drove with purpose but the purpose lay out ahead of him, undefined. A fat wad of dollar bills was nudging against his left nipple. What will I have? Darting lights, colour photographs of naked black girls in illuminated frames, multilingual signs proclaiming
LIVE EROTIC SEX
. Respect it but not my mood tonight. He kept driving. Pimps, pushers, cops, bunch o' nancy boys, all looking for a buck. Uniformed GIs in threes. He passed the Club Costa Brava, young Chinese whores a speciality. Thanks, darlings, prefer 'em older and more grateful. Still he kept driving, his senses leading, which was what he liked his senses to do. The old Adam stirring. Taste everything, only way. Hell can you know whether you want a thing till you've bought it? His mind flitted back to Luxmore.
The greatest opinion maker in the world believes in it. . . .
Must be Ben Hatry. Luxmore had dropped his
name a couple o' times in London. Punned with it. Our
Ben
efit Fund, ha ha. The
Ben
ison of a certain patriotic media baron.
You didn't hear that, young Mr. Osnard. The name of Hatry will never cross my lips.
Suck o' the teeth. What an arsehole.

Osnard swung his car across the road, hit the curb, mounted it and parked on the pavement. I'm a diplomat, so screw the lot o' you.
CASINO AND CLUB
, said the sign, and on the door
All Handguns to Be Checked.
Two nine-foot bouncers in capes and peaked hats guarded the entrance. Girls in miniskirts and net stockings undulated at the foot of a red staircase. Looks my kind o' place.

It was six in the morning.

“Damn you, Andy Osnard, you had me scared,” Fran confessed with feeling as he climbed into bed beside her. “What the hell happened to you?”

“She wore me out,” he said.

But his revival was already apparent.

14

The rage that had swept over Pendel with his departure from the pushbutton house of love did not subside as he climbed into the four-track or drove home badly through red mist or lay with a thumping heart on his side of the bed in Bethania, or woke next morning or the morning after. “I'll need some days,” he had mumbled to Osnard. But it was not the days he was counting. It was the years. It was every wrong turning he had taken to oblige. It was every insult he had swallowed for the sake of the greater good, preferring to
drucken
himself rather than cause what Benny called a
gewalt
. It was every scream that had stopped in his throat before it reached the open air. It was a lifetime's worth of frustrated fury arriving uninvited among the host of characters who, for want of closer definition, traded under the name of Harry Pendel.

And it woke him like a bugle call, reviving and reproaching him in one huge blast, rallying his other emotions to its flag. Love, fear, outrage and revenge were among the first volunteers. It swept away the puny wall that had separated fact from fiction in Pendel's soul. It said “Enough!” and “Attack!” and tolerated no deserters. But attack what? And what with?

We want to buy your friend,
Osnard is saying.
And if we can't, we'll send him back to prison. Ever been to prison, Pendel?

Yes. And so's Mickie. And I saw him there. And he'd hardly got the wind to say “hullo.”

We want to buy your wife,
Osnard is saying
. And if we can't, we'll throw her onto the street and your kids with her. Ever been on the street, Pendel?

It's where I came from.

And these threats were pistols, not dreams. Held to his head by Osnard. All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place and the truth was in another. To ride with the pressure until he could hop off and go home.

But Osnard's pressure hadn't let him hop off.

Berating himself, Pendel went through his usual material. As a practised self-accuser, he tore his hair and called on God to witness his remorse. I'm ruined! It's a judgment! I'm back in prison! All life is a prison! It doesn't matter whether I'm inside or out! And I brought it all on myself! But his anger didn't go away. Eschewing Louisa's Cooperative Christianity, he resorted to the fearful language of Benny's half-remembered efforts at atonement as chanted into his empty tankard at the Wink & Nod:
We have harmed, corrupted, and ruined. . . . We are guilty, we have betrayed. . . . We have robbed, we have slandered. . . . We have perverted and led astray. . . . We have been false. . . . We cut ourselves off from truth, and reality exists to entertain us. We hide behind distractions and toys.
The anger still refused to budge. It went wherever Pendel went, like a cat in a sick pantomime. Even when he embarked on a merciless historical analysis of his despicable behaviour from the beginning of time until the present day, his anger turned the sword away from his own breast and outward at the perverters of his humanity.

In the Beginning was the Hard Word, he told himself. It was applied by Andy when he barged into my shop, and there was no resisting it
because it was pressure, not only regarding the summer frocks but also one Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.

And in consequence of the above, there was me undertaking to be a listening post. So I listened. And I heard a few things. And what wasn't heard as such was heard in my head, which was only natural, given the degree of pressure exerted. I'm a service industry, so I served. What's so wrong about that? And after that there was what I would call a flowering at a certain level, which was hearing a lot more and getting better at it, because a thing you learn about spying is, it's like trade, it's like sex: it has to get better or it won't get anywhere.

So I entered what we might call the area of
positive hearing,
in which certain words are put into people's mouths that they would have said if they'd thought of them at the time. Which is what everyone does anyway. Plus I photographed a few bits and pieces from Louisa's briefcase, which I did
not
like doing but Andy would have it and, bless him, he loves his photographs. But it wasn't stealing. It was looking. And anyone can look, is what I say. With or without a cigarette lighter in his pocket.

And what happened after that was Andy's fault completely. I never encouraged him, I never even thought of it till he did. Andy required me to obtain
subsources,
your subsource being a bird of a very different feather from your unaware informant, and necessitating what I call a quantum leap, plus substantial retuning as regards the purveyor's mental attitude. But I'll tell you something about subsources. Subsources, once you get into the way of them, are very nice people, a lot nicer than some I could name who have a somewhat larger place in reality, subsources being a secret family that don't answer back or have problems unless you tell them to. Subsources are about turning your friends into what they nearly were already, or would like to be, but strictly speaking never will be. Or what they wouldn't like to be at all but rationally might have been, given what they are.