The Tailor of Panama (32 page)

Take Sabina—whom Marta based loosely on herself, but not entirely—for example. Take your average fiery bomb-making student waiting to do his worst. Take Alpha and Beta and certain others who for reasons of security must remain nameless. Take Mickie with his Silent Opposition and his Conspiracy That Nobody Can Put His Finger On, which in my personal judgment was an idea of pure genius except that sooner rather than later I'm going to have to put my finger on it in a manner that will satisfy all parties, owing to Andy's highly remorseless pressure. Take the People Who Live the Other Side of the Bridge and the Real Heart of Panama that nobody can find except Mickie and a few students with a stethoscope. Take Marco, who wouldn't say yes until I'd had his wife speak to him severely about the new deep freeze she wanted and the second car and getting their kid into the Einstein, which I just
may
be able to arrange for them if Marco comes through on certain other fronts, and maybe she ought to have another word with him in that regard?

All fluence. Loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure.

So you build up your subsources and do their listening for them, and their worrying, and you research for them and read for them and listen to Marta about them, and you put them in the right places at the right times and generally set them off to their best advantage with all their ideals and problems and little ways, the same as I do in the shop. And you pay them, which is only proper. Part cash in their pockets and the rest put aside for a rainy day so that they don't flash it around and make themselves look silly and conspicuous and expose themselves to the full rigour of the law. The only trouble being that my subsources can't have the cash in their pockets because they don't know they've earned it and some don't have the pockets as such, so I have to have it in mine. But that's only fair when you think about it because they
haven't
earned it, have they? I have. So I take the cash. Or Andy banks it for me in his widows and orphans. And the subsources are none the wiser,
which is what Benny would have called a bloodless con. And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.

Prisoners, it is well known, have their own morality. Such was Pendel's.

And having duly flailed himself and exonerated himself, he was at peace, except that the black cat was still glowering at him and the peace he felt was of the armed variety, a constructive outrage stronger and more lucid than any he had known in a lifetime peppered with injustices. He felt it in his hands, the way they tingled and muscled up. In his back, mostly across his shoulders. In his hips and heels as he strode about the house and shop. Thus exalted, he was able to clench his fists and hammer on the wooden walls of the prisoner's dock that always mentally surrounded him and roar out his innocence, or innocence as near as made no odds:

Because I'll tell you something else, Your Honour, while we're about it, if you'll wipe that Top Sheep's smile off your face:
it takes two to tango.
And Mr. Andrew Osnard of Her Majesty's celestial whatnot
tangos.
I can feel it. Whether
he
can feel it is another matter, but I
think
he can. Sometimes people don't know they're doing things. But Andy's egging me on. He's making more of me than what I am, counting everything twice and pretending it's only the once, plus he's bent, because I know bent, and London's worse than he is.

It was at this point in his deliberations that Pendel stopped addressing his Maker, His Honour, or himself, and glared ahead of him at the wall of his workroom, where he happened to be cutting yet another life-improving suit for Mickie Abraxas, the one that would win him back his wife. After so many of them, Pendel could have cut it with his eyes shut. But his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. He seemed to be straining for oxygen, though his workroom, thanks to its high windows, had an adequate supply. He had been playing Mozart, but Mozart was no longer his mood. With one hand he blindly switched him off. With the other he laid down his
shears, but his gaze didn't flinch. It remained mooning at the same spot on the wall which, unlike other walls he had known, was painted neither millstone grey nor slime green but a soothing shade of gardenia that he and his decorator had taken pains to achieve.

Then he spoke. Aloud. One word.

Not as Archimedes might have spoken it. Not with any recognisable emotion. Rather in the tone of the I-speak-your-weight machines that had enlivened the railway stations of his childhood. Mechanically, but with assertion.

“
Jonah,
” he said.

Harry Pendel was having his grand vision at last. It floated before him at this very minute, intact, superb, fluorescent, complete. He'd had it from the start, he now realised, like a wad of money in his back pocket when all this time he'd been starving, thinking he was broke, struggling, aspiring, straining for knowledge he never quite possessed. Yet he possessed it! It had been sitting there, his very own to dispose of, his secret store! And he'd forgotten its existence until now! And here it was before him in glorious polychrome. My grand vision, pretending to be a wall. My conspiracy that has found its cause. The original uncut version. Brought to your screens by popular demand. And radiantly illuminated by anger.

And its name is Jonah.

It is a year ago but in Pendel's vaulting memory, it is here and now and on the wall in front of him. It is a week after Benny's death. It is two days into Mark's first term at the Einstein and one day after Louisa has resumed gainful employment with the Canal. Pendel is driving his four-track. His destination is Colón, the purpose of his mission twofold: to pay his monthly visit to Mr. Blüthner's textile warehouse, and to become a member of the Brotherhood at last.

He drives fast, as people do when they are driving to Colón, partly out of fear of highwaymen, partly in anticipation of the riches of the Free Zone ahead of them down the road. He is wearing a black
suit that he has put on in the shop in order not to cause aggravation in the home, and he has six days' worth of stubble. While Benny grieved for a departed friend, he gave up shaving. Pendel can do no less for Benny. He has even brought a black homburg, though he intends to leave it on the back seat.

“It's a rash,” he explains to Louisa, who for her comfort and safety has not been informed of Benny's death as such, having been led to believe some years ago that Benny had died in alcoholic obscurity and accordingly presented no further threat. “I think it's that new Swedish aftershave I was testing for the boutique,” he adds, inviting her concern.

“Harry, you will write to those Swedes and you will tell them their lotion is dangerous. It is not appropriate for sensitive skins. It is life threatening for our children, it is inconsistent with Swedish notions of hygiene, and if the rash persists, you will sue the daylights out of them.”

“I've already drafted it,” says Pendel.

The Brotherhood is Benny's last wish, expressed in a failing scrawl that arrived at the shop after his death:

Harry boy, what you have been to me no question is a pearl of very great price except in one regard which is Charlie Blüthner's Brotherhood. A fine business you've got, two children and who knows what's in the pipeline. But the plum is still before you and why you wouldn't pick it all these years is beyond me. Who Charlie doesn't know in Panama is not worth knowing, plus good works and influence have always gone hand in hand, with the Brotherhood behind you you'll never want for business or necessities. Charlie says the door's still open plus he owes me. Though never as much as I'll owe you, my son, when I'm standing in the corridor waiting for my turn, which in my private opinion is a longshot but don't tell your Auntie Ruth. This place is all right if you like rabbis.

Blessings, Benny

Mr. Blüthner in Colón rules over half an acre of open-plan offices full of computers and happy secretaries in high-necked blouses and black skirts, and he is the second-most-respectable man in the world after Arthur Braithwaite. Each morning at seven he boards his company plane and has himself flown for twenty minutes to Colón's France Field airport, where he is set down among the gaily painted aircraft of Colombian import-export executives who have dropped by to do a little tax-free shopping or, being too busy, sent their womenfolk instead. Each evening at six he flies home again, except on Fridays, when he flies home at three, and at Yom Kippur when the firm takes its annual holiday and Mr. Blüthner atones for sins that no one knows about except himself and, until a week ago, Uncle Benny.

“Harry.”

“Mr. Blüthner, sir, always a pleasure.”

It's the same every time. The enigmatic smile, the formal handshake, the waterproof respectability and no mention of Louisa. Except that on this day the smile is sadder and the handshake longer, and Mr. Blüthner is wearing a black tie from stock.

“Your Uncle Benjamin was a great man,” he says, patting Pendel's shoulder with his powdery little claw.

“A giant, Mr. B.”

“Your business prospers, Harry?”

“I'm fortunate, Mr. B.”

“You don't worry that the world gets warmer all the time? Soon nobody will buy your jackets?”

“When God invented the sun, Mr. Blüthner, he was wise enough to invent air-conditioning.”

“And you would like to meet some friends of mine,” says Mr. Blüthner, with a twinkly smile.

Mr. Blüthner in Colón is several degrees racier than his familiar on the Pacific side.

“I don't know why I ever put it off,” says Pendel.

On other days they would have taken the back stairs to the textiles department, for Pendel to admire the new alpacas. But today
it's the crowded streets they take to, Mr. Blüthner leading at a good snap until, sweating like stevedores, they arrive before an unmarked door. Mr. Blüthner holds a key in his hand, but first he must give Pendel a roguish wink.

“You don't mind we sacrifice a virgin, Harry? Tarring and feathering a few
schwartzers
not going to be a problem to you?”

“Not if it's what Benny would have wanted for me, Mr. Blüthner.”

Having darted a conspiratorial glance up and down the pavement, Mr. Blüthner turns his key and gives the door a vigorous shove. It is a year ago or more, but it is here and now. On the gardenia wall in front of him Pendel sees the same door open, and the same pitch blackness beckon.

15

From bouncing sunlight Pendel followed his host into darkest night, lost him and stood still, waiting for his eyes to make the change, smiling in case he could be seen. Whom would he meet, in what weird attire? He sniffed the air but, instead of incense or warm blood, smelled old tobacco smoke and beer. Then gradually the instruments of the torture chamber came floating forward to present themselves: bottles behind a bar, a mirror behind the bottles, an Asian barman of great age, a cream-coloured piano with cavorting girls daubed on its raised lid, wooden fans puttering from the ceiling, a high window and a cord to open it, broken off short. And last, because they gleamed the least, Pendel's fellow searchers for the Light, dressed, not in zodiacal robes and conical hats, but in the drab fatigues of Panamanian commerce: white short-sleeved shirts, buckled trousers under bricklayer bellies, loosened neckties patterned in red cauliflower.

Several faces were known to him from the humbler fringes of the Club Unión: Dutch Henk, whose wife had recently bolted to Jamaica with his savings and a Chinese drummer, tiptoeing gravely towards him with a frosted pewter tankard in each hand: “Harry, our Brother, we are proud you have at last arrived among us”—as if Pendel had trekked across the polders to get to him. Olaf, Swedish shipping agent and drunk, with pebble spectacles and a wire-wool hairpiece, yelling in his cherished Oxford accent that wasn't one: “I say, Brother Harry, old chap, good show, cheers.” Belgian Hugo,
self-styled scrap-metal merchant and former Congo hand, offering Pendel “something very special from your old country” out of a shaking silver hip flask.

No tethered virgins, no bubbling tar barrels or terrified
schwartzers:
just all the other reasons why Pendel had never joined till now, the same old cast in the same old play, with “What's your poison, Brother Harry?” and “Let's fill that up for you, Brother,” and “What took you so long to come to us, Harry?” Until Mr. Blüthner himself, adorned in a Beefeater's cape and mayoral chain, sounded two hoarse blasts on a dented English hunting horn, and a pair of double doors was kicked open to admit a column of Asian porters with trays above their heads, marching into the room at punishment speed to a chant of “Hold him down, you Zulu warrior,” led by none other than Mr. Blüthner himself, who, as Pendel was beginning to understand, was retrieving certain elements that had gone missing from his early life, such as delinquency in adolescence.

For having summoned everyone to table, Mr. Blüthner placed himself at the centre of it and Pendel at his side and remained standing happily at attention, as they all did, while Dutch Henk delivered himself of a long, incomprehensible grace, the drift of which being that the company would be even more virtuous than it already was if it ate the food before it—a premise Pendel was inclined to question as he took his first fatal mouthful of the most character-changing curry that had come his way since Benny last whisked him round the corner for a nice touch of Mr. Khan's while your Auntie Ruth is doing her piety up the Daughters of Zion.

But no sooner had they sat than Mr. Blüthner bounded to his feet again with two messages that were delightful to the company: our Brother Pendel making his first appearance among us here today— thunderous applause, interspersed with jocular obscenities, the company becoming by now mellow—and allow me to introduce a Brother who needs no introduction, so a big hand, please, for our wandering sage and longtime Servant of the Light, diver of the deep
and explorer of the unknown, who has penetrated more dark places—dirty laughter—than any of us round this table today, the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah, freshly returned from a triumphant wreck-raising expedition in the Dutch East Indies, of which some of you will have read. (Cries of “Where?”)