The Tailor of Panama (35 page)

She turned off the shower.

“Squash, dear. Are you playing tonight?”

“Do you want me to?”

“It's Thursday. Club night at the shop. I thought you always played squash on Thursdays. Standing date with Jo-Ann.”

“Do you
wish
me to play squash with Jo-Ann?”

“I was only asking, Lou. Not wishing. Asking. You like to keep fit, we know that. It shows, too.”

Count to five. Twice.

“Yes, Harry, tonight I intend to play squash with Jo-Ann.”

“Right. Great.”

“I shall come home from work. I shall change. I shall drive to the club and play squash with Jo-Ann. We have a court booked from seven to eight.”

“Well, give her my love. She's a nice woman.”

“Jo-Ann likes two consecutive half-hour periods. One period to practise her backhand, one to practise her forehand. For her partner, that routine is naturally reversed. Unless the partner is left-handed, which I am not.”

“Got you. Understood.”

“And the children will be visiting with the Oakleys,” she added, in extension of her previous bulletin. “They will eat fattening crisps, drink tooth-corroding cola, absorb violent television and
camp on the Oakleys' insanitary floor in the interests of reconciliation between our two families.”

“Okay, then. Thanks.”

“Not at all.”

The shower started again and she went back to soaping her hair. The shower stopped.

“And after squash, it being Thursday, I shall devote myself to my work, planning and synthesising Señor Delgado's engagements for the forthcoming week.”

“So you said. And a very full schedule, I hear. I'm impressed.”

Rip aside the curtain. Promise her to be completely real from now on. But reality was no longer Pendel's subject, if it ever had been. On the way to school he sang the whole of “My object all sublime,” and the children thought he was joyously mad. Entering his shop he became an enchanted stranger. The new blue rugs and smart furnishings amazed him; so did the sight of the Sportsman's Corner in Marta's glass box and the shiny new frame round Braithwaite's portrait. Who on earth did that? I did. He was delighted by the aroma of Marta's coffee issuing from the clubroom upstairs and the sight of a fresh bulletin on student protest in the drawer of his worktable. By ten o'clock the doorbell had already started ringing with promises of inspiration.

First to require his attention were the American chargé and his pale aide, come to fit a new dinner jacket which the chargé called a tux. Parked outside the shop stood his armoured Lincoln Continental manned by a stern driver with a crew cut. The chargé was a droll, well-to-do Bostonian who had spent a lifetime reading Proust and playing croquet. His topic was the vexed matter of the American Families' Thanksgiving Barbecue and Fireworks Display, a subject of perennial anxiety to Louisa.

“We have no civilised alternative, Michael,” the chargé insisted in his Brahmin's drawl while Pendel chalked the collar.

“Right,” said the pale aide.

“Either we treat them like house-trained adults or we say they're bad kids we don't trust.”

“Right,” said the pale aide again.

“People respond to respect. If I did not believe that, I would not have devoted my best years to the comedy of diplomacy.”

“
If
we could kindly bend our arm to the halfway mark, sir,” Pendel murmured, laying the edge of his palm in the crook of the chargé's elbow.

“The military will hate us,” said the aide.

“Are these lapels going to bulge, Harry? They look kind of busty to me. Don't they to you, Michael?”

“One pressing, you'll never hear from them again, sir.”

“Look great to me,” said the pale aide.

“And our length of sleeve, sir? About so, or a trifle shorter?”

“I'm hesitating,” said the chargé.

“About the military or the sleeves?” said the aide.

The chargé flapped his wrists, watching them critically as he did so.

“So is fine, Harry. Do
so
. I have no doubt, Michael, that if the boys on Ancón Hill had their way we'd be seeing five thousand men in combat gear line the road and everybody bussed in and out in APCs.”

The aide gave a grim laugh.

“However, we are not primitives, Michael. Nietzsche is not an appropriate role model for the world's only superpower as it enters the twenty-first century.”

Pendel turned the chargé sideways so that he could better admire his back.

“And our jacket length, sir, overall? A suspicion longer, or dare we say we're happy with what we see?”

“Harry, we are happy. It's tops. Forgive me for being a fraction
distrait
today. We're
trying
to prevent another war.”

“In which endeavour, sir, I'm sure we wish you all success,” said Pendel earnestly as the chargé and his aide tripped down the steps with the crew-cutted driver sashaying alongside.

He could hardly wait for them to leave. Heavenly choirs were singing in his ears as he scribbled frantically in the clandestine back pages of his tailor's notebook.

Friction between U.S. military and diplomatic personnel is reaching a highly critical flashpoint in the opinion of the U.S. chargé, the bone of contention being how to handle student insurrection if and when it raises its ugly head. In the words of the chargé, spoken in total confidence to this informant . . .

What did they tell him? Dross. What did he hear? Glories. And this was only a rehearsal.

“Dr. Sancho,” cried Pendel, opening his arms in delight. “Long time no see, sir. Señor Lucullo, what a pleasure. Marta, where's that fatted calf then?”

Sancho a plastic surgeon who owned cruise ships and had a rich wife he hated. Lucullo a hairdresser with expectations. Both from Buenos Aires. Last time it had been mohair suits with double-breasted waistcoats for Europe. This time we just
have
to have white dinner jackets for the yacht.

“And all's quiet on the home front, then?” Pendel asked, artfully debriefing them over a glass upstairs. “No big putsches planned at all? I always say South America's the only place where you can cut a gentleman his suit one week and see his statue wearing it the next.”

No big putsches, they confirmed with a giggle.

“But Harry, have you
heard
what
our
President said to
your
President when they thought nobody was listening?”

Pendel hadn't.

“There were these three presidents all sitting in one room, right? Panama, Argentine, Peru. ‘Well,' says the President of Panama, ‘it's all right for
you
boys.
You
get reelected for a second term. But at home in Panama reelection is prohibited by our constitution. It simply isn't fair at all.' So
our
President turns round and says, ‘Well, my dear, maybe it's because I can do twice what
you
can only do once!' Then the President of Peru says—”

But Pendel never heard what the President of Peru said. Heavenly choirs sang again for him as he duly recorded in his notebook the back-door efforts of the pro-Japanese President of Panama to extend his power into the twenty-first century, as confided by the devious and hypocritical Ernie Delgado to his trusted private secretary and indispensable assistant, Louisa, also known as Lou.

“Those bastards in the opposition sent a woman to slap me at the meeting last night,” Juan Carlos of the Legislative Assembly announces proudly while Pendel chalks the shoulders of his morning suit. “I never saw the bitch in my life. Steps out of the crowd, runs up to me all smiling. TV cameras, newspapers. Next thing I know, she's given me a right hook. What am I supposed to do? Slap her one back in front of the cameras? Juan Carlos the woman beater? If I do nothing, they call me a poofter. You know what I do?”

“I can't imagine”—checking the waist and adding an inch to accommodate Juan Carlos's rise to fortune.

“Kiss her on the mouth. Put my tongue down her filthy throat. Got breath like a pig. They adore me.”

Pendel dazzled. Pendel levitated by admiration.

“Now what's all this I'm hearing about them putting you in charge of some very select committee, Juan Carlos?” he asks severely. “I'll be dressing you for your presidential inauguration next.”

Juan Carlos let out a peal of coarse laughter.

“
Select
? The
Poverty
Committee? It's the lousiest committee in town. Got no money, no future. We sit and stare at each other, we say it's a pity about the poor, then we go have ourselves a decent lunch.”

In yet another intimate one-to-one conversation conducted with his highly trusted personal assistant behind closed doors, Ernesto Delgado, driving force of the Canal Commission and keen pusher of the top-secret Japanese-Panamanian accord, remarked that a certain confidential file on the subject of the Canal's future would have to be slipped to the Poverty Committee for Juan Carlos to run his eye over. When asked what in the
world the Poverty Committee had to do with Canal matters, Delgado gave a crafty smile and replied that not everything is what it seems in the world.

She was at her desk. He could see her exactly as he dialled her direct line: the elegant upper corridor of the Administration Building with its original louvre doors to keep the air moving; her tall airy room with its view of the old railway station desecrated by the McDonald's sign that drove her crazy every day; her supermodern desk with its computer screen and low-flush telephone. Her moment's indecision before she picks up the receiver.

“I wondered whether there was anything special you wanted to eat tonight, darling.”

“Why?”

“Thought I might drop in at the market on my way home.”

“Salad.”

“Something light after squash, right? Darling?”

“Yes, Harry. After squash, I shall require a light meal such as salad. As usual.”

“Busy day? Old Ernie on the stomp, is he?”

“What do you want?”

“I wanted to hear your voice, that's all, darling.”

Her laughter unnerved him. “Well, you'd better be quick, because in two minutes this voice is going to be interpreting for a bunch of earnest harbourmasters from Kyoto who speak no Spanish and not a lot of English and only wish to meet the President of Panama.”

“I love you, Lou.”

“I hope so, Harry. Now excuse me.”

“Kyoto, eh?”

“Yes, Harry. Kyoto. Goodbye.”

“KYOTO,” he wrote ecstatically in capitals. What a subsource. What a woman. What a coup.
And only wish to meet the President.
And they shall. And Marco will be there to usher them to His Luminosity's secret chambers. And Ernie will hang up his halo and
go with them. And Mickie will get to hear of it, thanks to his own highly paid sources in Tokyo or Timbuktu or wherever he bribes them. And ace operator Pendel will report it word for word.

Intermission while Pendel, cloistered in his cutting room, combs the local newspapers—these days he takes them all—turns up a daily court circular entitled: “Today Your President Will Receive.” No mention of earnest harbourmasters from Kyoto, no Japanese on the menu at all. Excellent. Then the meeting was off the record. A secret, highly clandestine meeting, Marco let them in at the back door, a bunch of tight-lipped Japanese bankers pretending to be harbourmasters who don't speak Spanish, but they do. Add a second coat of magic paint and multiply the result by infinity. Who else was there—apart from wily Ernie? Of course! Guillaume was! The crafty Frog himself! And here he is, standing before me, shaking like a leaf!

“Monsieur Guillaume, sir, greetings, slap on time as usual! Marta, a glass of the Scottish one for Monsieur.”

Guillaume comes from Lille. He is mousy and swift. By profession he is a consultant geologist who samples soil for prospectors. He has just returned from five weeks in Medellín, in the course of which, he tells Pendel breathlessly, the city has played host to twelve reported kidnappings and twenty-one reported murders. Pendel is making him a fawn alpaca single-breasted with a waistcoat and the spare trousers. Artfully he steers the conversation towards the topic of Colombian politics.

“I don't see how that president of theirs dare show his face, quite frankly,” he complains. “Not with all the scandals and the drugs.”

Guillaume takes a gulp of Scotch and blinks.

“Harry, I thank God each day I live that I am a mere technician. I go in. I read the soil. I make my report. I get out. I go home. I have dinner. I make love to my wife. I exist.”

“Plus you put in your very large fee,” Pendel reminds him genially.

“In advance,” Guillaume agrees, nervously confirming his survival with the aid of the long mirror. “And first I bank it. If they want to shoot me, they know they waste their money.”

The only other participant to the meeting being the highly retiring top French geologist and freelance international consultant with close links to the Medellín cartel at the policymaking level, one Guillaume Delassus, esteemed in certain circles as a power broker without equal and the fifth-most-dangerous man in Panama.

And the other four prizes still to be awarded, he added to himself as he wrote.

Lunch-hour rush. Marta's tuna sandwiches in heavy demand. Marta herself everywhere and nowhere, deliberately avoiding Pendel's eye. Gusts of cigarette smoke and male laughter. Panamanians loving their fun, and doing it at P & B's. Ramón Rudd has brought a handsome boy. Beer from the ice bucket, wine wrapped in frozen wadding, newspapers from home and abroad, portable telephones used for effect. Pendel in his triple element of tailor, host and master spy skipping between fitting room and clubroom, pausing in midflight to dash off innocent memoranda in the back of his notebook, hearing more than he listens to, remembering more than he hears. The old guard with new recruits in tow. Talk of scandal, horses, money. Talk of women and occasionally the Canal. Crash of the front door, noise level falls, then rises, cries of “Rafi! Mickie!” as the Abraxas-Domingo show sweeps in with its customary panache, the famous playboy pair reconciled once more, Rafi all gold chains, gold rings, gold teeth and Italian shoes, with a coat-of-many-colours by P & B flung over his shoulders because Rafi hates dull, hates jackets unless they are outrageous, loves laughter, sunshine and Mickie's wife.