The Tailor of Panama (44 page)

She had counted them onto the worktable by the glow from the skylight above her. Seven thousand dollars from his back pocket, pressed on her like guilt money the moment he heard of Mickie's death—here, take this, it's Osnard's money, Judas money, Mickie money, now it's yours. You'd think a man setting out to do what Harry had to do would keep his money in his pocket for eventualities. Undertaker money. Police money.
Chiquilla
money. But Harry had scarcely put the receiver down before he was pulling the wad out of his back pocket, wanting to be shot of every dirty dollar. Where had he got it from? the police had asked her.

“You're not stupid, Marta. You can read, study, make bombs, make trouble, lead marches. Who gives him his money? Does Abraxas give it to him? Is he working for Abraxas and Abraxas is working for the British? What does he give Abraxas in return?”

“I don't know. My employer tells me nothing. Get out of my flat.”

“He fucks you, doesn't he?”

“No, he doesn't fuck me. He comes to see me because I have headaches and vomiting attacks and he is my employer and he was with me when I was beaten. He is a caring man and happily married.”

No, he doesn't fuck me, that at least was true, though it cost her more to tell them this precious truth than any number of easy lies. No, officer, he doesn't fuck me. No, officer, I don't ask him to. We lie on my bed, I put my hand in the heat of his crotch but only outside, he puts his hand inside my blouse, but one breast is all that he allows himself though he knows he can have the whole of me anytime he wants, because he has the whole of me already, but the guilt owns him, he has more guilt than sins. And I tell him stories of who we might be if we were young and brave again in the days before they took my face off with their clubs. And that is love.

Marta's head was throbbing again, and she felt sick. She stood up, clutching the money in both hands. She couldn't stand another minute in the Cuna work room. She walked down the corridor as far as the door to her office and, like a guided tourist a hundred years from now, stood at the threshold and looked in while she gave herself the commentary:

This is where the halfbreed Marta sat and did her accounts for the tailor Pendel. Over there in the shelves you see the books on sociology and history that Marta used to read in her spare time in an effort to raise herself in society and fulfil the dreams of her dead father the carpenter. As a self-educated man, the tailor Pendel was concerned that all his staff but particularly the halfbreed Marta develop themselves to their maximum potential. This is the kitchen area, where Marta made her famous sandwiches, all the prominent men of Panama would speak in bated breath of Marta's sandwiches, including Mickie Abraxas the famous suicidal spy, tuna was her speciality but in her heart she wished she could poison the whole pack of them except for Mickie and her employer, Pendel. And over there in the corner behind the desk we have the very spot where in 1989 the tailor Pendel, having first closed the door, was sufficiently overcome to take Marta in his arms and protest his undying love for her. The tailor Pendel
proposed they visit a pushbutton but Marta preferred to take him to her own apartment, and it was on the drive there that Marta incurred the facial injuries that left her permanently scarred, and it was the fellow student Abraxas who suborned the cowardly doctor into leaving his indelible imprint upon her—that doctor was so terrified of losing his rich practice that he couldn't keep his hands still. The same doctor afterwards had the wisdom to inform on Abraxas, an act that led effectively to his destruction.

Closing the door on her dead self, Marta continued down the corridor to Pendel's cutting room. I'll leave the money in his top left drawer. The door was ajar. Lights were burning inside the room. Marta was not surprised. Not long ago, her Harry had been a man of unearthly discipline but in recent weeks the stitching of his too many lives had been too much for him. She pushed the door. Now we are in the tailor Pendel's cutting room, known to customers and employees alike as the Holy of Holies. Nobody was permitted to enter without knocking, or during his absence—except apparently for his wife, Louisa, who was seated at her husband's desk with her spectacles on and a pile of his old notebooks at her elbow, and a lot of pencils and an order book, and a tin of fly spray in front of her, opened at the base, while she played with the ornate cigarette lighter that Harry said a rich Arab had given him, though P & B had no rich Arabs on its books.

She was dressed in a thin red cotton wrapper and apparently nothing else, because as she leaned forward she revealed her breasts in their entirety. She was clicking the lighter on and off and smiling at Marta through the flame.

“Where's my husband?” Louisa asked.

Click.

“He's gone to Guararé,” Marta replied. “Mickie Abraxas killed himself at the fireworks.”

“I'm sorry.”

“So am I. So is your husband.”

“However, it was not unexpected. We have had about five years' warning of the event,” Louisa pointed out quite reasonably.

Click.

“He was appalled,” Marta said.

“Mickie?”

“Your husband,” Marta said.

“Why does my husband keep a special invoice book for Mr. Osnard's suits?”

Click.

“I don't know. It puzzles me too,” Marta said.

“Are you his mistress?”

“No.”

“Does he have one?”

Click.

“No.”

“Is that his money you're holding in your hand?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Click.

“He gave it me,” Marta said.

“For fucking?”

“For safekeeping. It was in his pocket when he heard the news.”

“Where does it come from?”

Click, and a flame that lit Louisa's left eye, so close that Marta wondered why her eyebrow didn't catch fire and the flimsy red wrapper with it.

“I don't know,” Marta replied. “Some customers pay cash. He doesn't always know what to do with it. He loves you. He loves his family more than anything on earth. He loved Mickie too.”

“Does he love anybody else?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

She was examining a piece of paper. “Is this Mr. Osnard's correct home address? Torre del Mar? Punta Paitilla?”

Click.

“Yes,” Marta said.

The conversation was over but Marta didn't realise this at first because Louisa went on clicking the lighter and smiling at the flame. And there were quite a few clicks and smiles before it occurred to Marta that Louisa was drunk in the way Marta's brother used to get drunk when life became too much for him. Not singing drunk or wobbly drunk, but crystal-headed, perfect-vision drunk. Drunk with all the knowledge she had been drinking to get rid of. And stark naked inside her wrapper.

21

It was one-twenty on the same morning when Osnard's front doorbell rang. For the last hour he had been in a state of advanced sobriety. At first, still raging from his defeat, he had revelled in violent methods of ridding himself of his hated guest: hurl him off the balcony to crash through the roof of the Club Unión a dozen floors below, ruining everybody's evening; drown him in the shower; put cleaning fluid in his whisky—“Eh, well, Andrew, if you insist, but only the merest finger, if you please”—suck of the teeth as he expires. His fury was not confined to Luxmore:

Maltby
! My ambassador and golfing partner, Christ's sake! Queen's own bloody representative, faded flower o' the British bloody Diplomatic Service, and gyps me like a pro!

Stormont
! Soul o' probity, one o' life's born losers, last o' the white men, Maltby's faithful poodle with the stomachache, egging his master on with nods and grunts while My Lord Bishop Luxmore gives them both his blessing!

Was it conspiracy or cock-up? Osnard asked himself, over and over again. Was Maltby tipping a wink when he spoke of “share and share alike” and “can't hang on to the whole game”?
Maltby,
that smirking pedant, putting his fingers in the till? Bastard wouldn't know how. Forget it. And Osnard to a degree did indeed forget it. His natural pragmatism reasserted itself, he abandoned vengeful thoughts and applied himself instead to saving what remained of his great enterprise. The ship is holed
but not sunk, he told himself. I'm still
BUCHAN
's paymaster. Maltby's right.

“Care for something different, sir, or prefer to stay with the malt?” “Andrew, please. I beseech you.
Scottie
, if you don't mind.”

“I'll try,” Osnard promised and, stepping through the open French doors, poured him another industrial-sized shot of malt whisky from the sideboard in the dining room and returned with it to the balcony. Jet lag, whisky and insomnia were finally taking their toll of Luxmore, he decided, clinically examining his master's semi-recumbent figure in the deck chair before him. So was the humidity—the flannel shirt soaked through, tracks of sweat streaming down the beard. So was his terror at being stuck out here in enemy territory with no wife to look after him—the haunted eyes flinching with every sudden clatter of footsteps or police siren or ribald shout that zigzagged up at them through the gimcrack canyons of Punta Paitilla. The sky was clear as water and strewn with brittle stars. A poacher's moon etched a light-path between the anchored shipping in the mouth of the Canal, but no breeze came off the sea. It seldom did.

“You asked me whether there was anything Head Office might do to make life a bit easier for the station, sir,” Osnard reminded Luxmore diffidently.

“Did I, Andrew? Well, I'm damned.” Luxmore sat up with a jolt. “Fire ahead, Andrew, fire ahead. Though I'm pleased to see you've already done yourself pretty well out here,” he added, not entirely pleasantly, with an erratic swing of the arm that took in both the view and the grand apartment. “Don't think I'm criticising you, mind. I drink to you. To your grit. Your acumen. Your youth. Qualities we all admire. Good health!” Slurp. “You've a great career ahead of you, Andrew. Easier times than we had in my day, I may add. A softer bed. You know how much this costs at home now? Lucky if you see change out of a twenty-pound note.”

“It's about this safe house I mentioned, sir,” Osnard reminded him, in the manner of an anxious heir at his dying father's bedside.
“Time we weaned ourselves away from pushbuttons and three-hour hotels. Thought maybe one o' those conversions in the Old City would give us greater operational scope.”

But Luxmore was transmitting, not receiving. “The way those stuffed shirts backed you up this evening, Andrew. My God, it's not often you see respect like that lavished on a younger man. There's a medal in here somewhere for you when this is over. A certain little lady across the river may feel obliged to show her appreciation.”

A lull while he gazed in perplexity at the bay and seemed to confuse it with the Thames.

“Andrew!”—abruptly as he woke.

“Sir?”

“That fellow Stormont.”

“What about him?”

“Came a cropper in Madrid. Some woman he took up with,

social tart. Married her, if I remember rightly. Beware of him.”

“I will.”

“And her, Andrew.”

“I will.”

“Do you have a woman here?”—peering round facetiously, under the sofa, at the curtains, acting bright. “No hot-arsed Latin lovely tucked away at all? Don't answer that. Good health again. Keep her to yourself. Wise fellow.”

“I've been a bit too busy, actually, sir,” Osnard confessed with a rueful smile. But he refused to give up. He had a notion he was printing things into Luxmore's subliminal memory for later. “Only in my view, you see, in a perfect world we should be shooting for
two
safe houses. One for the network, which would obviously be my sole responsibility—Cayman Islands holding company's the best answer—and
another
house—available on an extremely limited, need-to-know basis and more representational in style—to service the Abraxas team, and eventually—provided always we can do it without creating interconsciousness, which at this stage I rather
doubt—the students. And I think
probably
I should be handling that one too—as far as the purchase and cover details go—even if Ambass and Stormont have sole use at the end of the day. I don't think they have our expertise, frankly. It's a risk we just don't need to take. I'd love your view on this. Not now, necessarily. Later.”

A long-delayed suck of the teeth told Osnard that his regional director was still with him, if only just. Reaching out, Osnard removed the empty glass from Luxmore's hand and set it on the ceramic table.

“So what do you think, sir? An apartment like this one for the opposition—fashionable, anonymous, handy for the financial community, nobody has to step out of his element—and a
second
house in the Old City, to be run in tandem?” He had been thinking for some time of getting a foot on the ladder of Panama's booming property market. “Basically, in the Old City you get what you pay for. It's location and location and location. A decent conversion at the moment—good duplex, architect designed— sets you back give or take fifty grand. Top o' the range, you get a twelve-room mansion, bit o' garden, rear access, sea view—offer them half a mil and they'll cut your arm off. Couple o' years from now, you've doubled your money, long as nobody does anything dramatic with the old Club Unión building that Torrijos turned into an Other Ranks Club out o' spite because the club wouldn't have him as a member. Better get an update before we plunge. I can arrange that.”

“Andrew!”

“Right here.”

Suck of the teeth. Eyes close, then sharply reopen.

“Eh, tell me something, Andrew.”

“If I can, Scottie.”