The Tailor of Panama (40 page)

“Must be ever such heavy secrets you've got in there,” the air hostess commented gaily as she saw him safely into dock.

Luxmore was delighted to recognise a fellow Scot.

“Where are you from, then, my dear?”

“Aberdeen.”

“But how splendid! The silver city, my God!”

“How about you?”

Luxmore was about to respond with a generous description of his Scottish provenance when he remembered that his false passport had Mellors born in Clapham. His embarrassment deepened when she held the door back for him while he fought the pouches for floor space to manoeuvre. Returning to his place he scanned the rows for potential hijackers and saw nobody he trusted.

The plane started its descent. My God, imagine! thought Luxmore, as awe at his mission and a hatred of flying alternated with the nightmare of discovery—she crashes into the sea—the pouches with her. Rescue ships from America, Cuba, Russia, and Britain race to the spot! Who was the mysterious Mellors? Why did his pouches plummet to the bottom of the ocean? Why were no papers found floating on the surface? Why will no one come forward to claim him? No widow, child, relative? The pouches are
raised. Will Her Majesty's Government kindly explain their extraordinary contents to a breathless world?

“Miami's your lot for this time, then, is it?” the air hostess asked, watching him saddle up to disembark. “I'll bet you'll be glad of a nice hot bath when you're shot of that lot.”

Luxmore kept his voice low in case Arabs overheard him. She was a good Scottish lass and deserved the truth.

“Panama,” he murmured.

But she had already left him. She was too busy asking passengers to make sure their seats were in the upright position and their belts securely fastened.

19

“They charge greens fees according to one's rank,” Maltby explained, selecting a middle iron for his approach shot. The flag stood eighty yards away, for Maltby a day's journey. “Private soldiers pay next to nothing. Achievers pay more as they go up the scale. They say the General can't afford to play at all.” He pulled a shaggy grin. “I did a deal,” he confided proudly. “I'm a sergeant.”

He lashed at the ball. Startled, it scurried sixty yards through sopping grass to safety, and hid. He loped after it. Stormont followed. An old Indian caddie in a straw hat was carrying a collation of ancient clubs in a mildewed bag.

The well-tended links of Amador are a bad golfer's dream, and Maltby was a bad golfer. They lie in well-groomed strips between a pristine U.S. Army base built in the vintage '20s, and the shore that runs beside the entrance to the Canal. There is a guard hut. There is a straight empty road protected by a bored American soldier and a bored Panamanian policeman. No one goes there much except the army and its wives. On one horizon lies El Chorrillo and beyond it the Satanic towers of Punta Paitilla, this morning softened by tiers of rolling cloud. Out to sea lie the islands and the causeway, and the obligatory line of motionless ships waiting for their turn to pass under the Bridge of the Americas.

But for the bad golfer the most seductive feature of the place is the straight grass trenches that are sunk thirty feet below sea level and, having once been a part of the Canal works, serve as
ducts for the imperfectly struck ball. The bad golfer may hook, he may slice. The trenches, for as long as he remains within their care, forgive him everything. All that is asked is that he connect and stay low.

“And Paddy's well and everything,” Maltby suggested, discreetly improving the lie of the ball with the toe of his cracked golf shoe. “Her cough's better.”

“Not really,” said Stormont.

“Oh dear. What do they say?”

“Not much.”

Maltby played again. The ball sped across the green and once more vanished. Maltby hurled himself after it. Rain fell. It was falling at ten-minute intervals but Maltby seemed unaware of it. The ball lay pertly at the centre of an island of sodden sand. The old caddie handed Maltby an appropriate club.

“You should get her away somewhere,” he advised Stormont airily. “Switzerland or wherever one goes these days. Panama's so insanitary. You never know which side the germs are coming from. Fuck.”

Like some primeval insect his ball scuttled into a clump of rich green pampas. Through sheets of rain Stormont watched his ambassador hack at it in huge arcs until it crept sullenly onto the green. Tension while Maltby performed a long putt. A peal of triumph as he holed out. He's snapped, thought Stormont. Mad. High time. A word, Nigel, if you'd be so good, Maltby had said on the telephone at one o'clock this morning, just as Paddy was getting off to sleep. Thought we might have it on the hoof, Nigel, if that's all right by you. Whatever you say, Ambassador.

“
Otherwise
the embassy seems a rather
happy
spot these days,” Maltby resumed as they strode out towards the next trench. “Barring Paddy's cough and poor old Phoebe.” Phoebe, his wife, neither so poor nor so old.

Maltby was unshaven. A ratty grey pullover, soaked through, hung from his upper body like a suit of chain mail of which he had
mislaid the trousers. Why doesn't the bloody man treat himself to a set of waterproofs? Stormont marvelled, as more rain seeped down his own neck.

“Phoebe's
never
happy,” Maltby was saying. “I can't think why she came back. I loathe her. She loathes me. The children loathe us both. There seems absolutely no point in any of it. We haven't screwed for simply years, thank God.”

Stormont preserved an appalled silence. Not once in the eighteen months that they had known each other had Maltby confided in him. Now suddenly, for reasons unknown, there was no limit to their frightful intimacy.

“
You
got divorced all right,” Maltby complained. “Yours was quite a public sort of thing too, if I remember. But you got over it. Your children speak to you. The Office didn't chuck you out.”

“Not quite.”

“Well, I do wish you'd have a word with Phoebe about it. Do her the world of good. Tell her you've been through it and it's not as bad as its reputation. She doesn't talk to people properly, that's part of the problem. Prefers to boss them about.”

“Perhaps it would be better if Paddy talked to her,” Stormont said.

Maltby was teeing up. He did this, Stormont noticed, without bending his knees. He simply folded himself in two, then unfolded himself, talking all the while.

“No, I think
you
should do it, quite honestly,” he went on, while he addressed the ball with menacing feints. “She worries about
me,
you see. She knows
she
can get on alone. But she thinks I'll be on the phone all the time asking her how to boil an egg. I wouldn't do any such thing. I'd move in a gorgeous girl and boil eggs for her all day long.” He drove and the ball shot upward, beyond the salvation of the trench. For a while it seemed content with its straight path. Then it changed its mind, turned left, and disappeared into walls of rain.

“Oh
fart
,” said the ambassador, revealing depths of language that Stormont had never guessed at.

The deluge became absurd. Leaving the ball to fend for itself, they repaired to a regimental bandstand set before a crescent of married officers' mansions. But the old caddie didn't like the bandstand. He preferred the dubious shelter of a cluster of palm trees, where he stood with the torrent streaming off his hat.

“
Otherwise
,” said Maltby, “as far as
I
know, we're rather a
jolly
crowd. No feuds, everyone chipper, our stock in Panama never higher, fascinating intelligence pouring in from all directions. What more can our masters ask? one wonders.”

“Why? What
are
they asking?”

But Maltby would not be hurried. He preferred his own strange path of indirection.

“Long chats with all sorts of people last night on Osnard's secret telephone,” he announced in a tone of fond reminiscence. “Have
you
had a go on it?”

“I can't say I have,” said Stormont.

“Hideous red affair, wired up to a Boer War washing machine. You can say anything you like on it. I was terribly impressed. Such nice chaps too. Not that one has ever met them. But they
sounded
nice. A conference call. One spent one's entire time apologising for interrupting. A man called Luxmore is on his way to us. A Scottish person. We're to call him Mellors. I'm not supposed to tell you, so naturally I shall. Luxmore-Mellors will bring us life-altering news.”

The rain had stopped dead, but Maltby didn't seem to have noticed. The caddie was still huddled under the palm trees, where he was smoking a plump roll of marijuana leaves.

“Perhaps you should stand that chap down,” Stormont suggested. “If you're not playing anymore.”

So they put some wet dollars together and sent the caddie back to the clubhouse with Maltby's clubs, and sat themselves on a dry bench at the edge of the bandstand and watched a swollen stream
racing through Eden, and the sun like God's glory breaking out on every leaf and flower.

“It has been decided—the passive voice is not of my choosing, Nigel—it has been decided that Her Majesty's Government will lend secret support and aid to Panama's Silent Opposition. On a deniable basis, naturally. Luxmore whom we must call Mellors is coming out to tell us how to do it. There's a handbook on it, I understand. ‘How to Oust Your Host Government,' or something of the sort. We must all dip into it. I don't know yet whether I shall be asked to admit Messrs. Domingo and Abraxas to my kitchen garden at dead of night or whether this will fall to you. Not that I have a kitchen garden, but I seem to remember that the late Lord Halifax did, and met all sorts of people there. You look askance. Is askance what you're looking?”

“Why can't Osnard take care of it?” Stormont asked.

“As his ambassador, I have not encouraged his involvement. The boy has enough responsibilities as it is. He's young. He's junior. These opposition people like the reassurance of a seasoned hand. Some are people like us, but some are hoary working-class chaps— stevedores, fishermen, farmers and the like. Far better we take the burden upon ourselves. We're also to support a shadowy body of bomb-making students, always tricky. We shall take over the students too. I'm sure you'll be very good with them. You seem troubled, Nigel. Have I upset you?”

“Why don't they send us more spies?”

“Oh, I don't think that's necessary. Visiting firemen perhaps, men like Luxmore-Mellors, but nobody permanent. We mustn't inflate the embassy's numbers unnaturally; it would invite comment. I made that point also.”

“
You
did?” said Stormont incredulously.

“Yes, indeed. With two such experienced heads as yours and mine, I said, additional staff were quite unnecessary. I was firm. They would litter the place up, I said. Unacceptable. I pulled
rank. I said we were men of the world. You would have been proud of me.”

Stormont thought he saw an unfamiliar sparkle in his ambassador's eye, best compared with the awakening of desire.

“We shall need an
enormous
amount of stuff,” Maltby went on, with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy looking forward to a new train set. “Radios, cars, safe houses, couriers, not to mention matériel—machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, masses of explosive, naturally, detonators, everything your heart has ever dreamed of. No modern Silent Opposition is complete without them, they assured me. And
spares
are frightfully important, one's told. Well, you know how careless students are. Give them a radio in the morning, it's covered in graffiti by lunchtime. And I'm sure Silent Oppositions are no better. The weapons will all be British, you'll be relieved to hear. There's a tried and tested British company already standing by to supply them, which is nice. Minister Kirby thinks the world of them. They earned their spurs in Iran, or was it Iraq? Probably both. Gully thinks the world of them too, I'm pleased to say, and the Office has accepted my suggestion that he be advanced immediately to the rank and condition of Buchaneer. Osnard is swearing him in even as we speak.”

“
Your
suggestion,” Stormont repeated numbly.

“Yes, Nigel, I have decided that you and I are well cast for the business of intrigue. I once remarked to you how I yearned to take part in a British plot. Well, here it is. The secret bugle has sounded. I trust that none of us will be found wanting in our zeal—I do wish you could look a little happier, Nigel. You don't seem to realise the import of what I'm telling you. This embassy is about to take an amazing leap forward. From a silted diplomatic backwater we shall become the hottest post in the ratings. Promotion, medals, notice of the most flattering kind will overnight be ours. Don't tell me you doubt our masters' wisdom? That would be very bad timing.”

“It's just that there seem to be rather a lot of stages missing,” Stormont said feebly, grappling with the acquisition of a brand-new ambassador.

“Nonsense. Of what sort?”

“Logic, for one.”

“Oh, really?”—coldly. “Where precisely do you detect a want of logic?”

“Well I mean take the Silent Opposition. Nobody's even heard of it apart from us. Why hasn't it done something—leaked something to the press—spoken up?”

Maltby was already scoffing. “But my dear chap! That's its name. That's its nature. It's silent. It keeps its counsel. Awaits its hour. Abraxas isn't a drunk. He's a bravura hero, a closet revolutionary for God and country. Domingo isn't a drug dealer with an oversized libido, he's a selfless warrior for democracy. As to the students, what is there to know? You remember how we were. Scatty. Inconstant. One thing one day, another thing the next. I fear you're becoming jaded, Nigel. Panama's getting you down. Time you took Paddy to Switzerland. Oh, and
yes
”—he went on, as if there was something he had omitted to say—“nearly forgot. Mr. Luxmore-Mellors will be bringing the gold bars,” he added, in the tone of someone tying a last administrative knot. “One can't trust banks and courier services in these cases, not in the dark world of intrigue that you and I are entering, Nigel, so he's posing as a Queen's Messenger and bringing them by diplomatic bag.”