The Tailor of Panama (36 page)

And Mickie sullen and unhappy but hanging on to his friend Rafi for dear life, as if Rafi is the only bit left to him after he has drunk and squandered all the rest away. The two men enter the fray and separate, the crowd draws to Rafi while Mickie heads for the fitting room and his umpteenth new suit that has to be finer
than Rafi's, brighter than Rafi's, costlier, cooler, more seductive— Rafi, are you going to win the First Lady's Gold Cup on Sunday?

Then suddenly the babel stops, whittled to one voice. It is Mickie's, booming and hopeless, emerging from the fitting room and announcing to the assembled company that his new suit is a piece of shit.

He says it one way, then repeats it another, straight into Pendel's face, a challenge he would prefer to fling at Domingo but dare not, so he flings it at Pendel instead. Then he says it a third way, because by now the gathering expects it of him. And Pendel not two feet from him, stone hard, waiting for him. On any other day Pendel would have sidestepped the onslaught, made a kindly joke, offered Mickie a drink, suggested he come back another time in a better mood, gentled him down the steps and poured him into a cab. The cellmates have played out such scenes before and Mickie has acknowledged them next day with expensive gifts of orchids, wine, precious huaca artefacts and craven hand-delivered notes of gratitude and apology.

But to expect this of Pendel today is to reckon without the black cat, which now bursts its leash and springs at Mickie with claws and teeth bared, ripping into him with a ferocity nobody dreamed Pendel could command. All the guilt he has ever felt about misusing Mickie's frailty, traducing him, exploiting him, selling him, visiting him in the pit of his blubbering humiliation, comes welling out of Pendel in a sustained salvo of transferred fury.

“Why I can't make suits like Armani?”
he repeated, several times, straight into Mickie's astonished face. “
Why I can't make Armani suits?
Congratulations, Mickie. You just saved yourself a thousand bucks. So do me a favour. Go down to Armani and buy yourself a suit and don't come back here. Because Armani makes better Armani suits than I can. The door's over there.”

Mickie didn't budge. He was stultified. How on earth did a man of his mountainous dimensions buy himself an Armani suit across the counter? But Pendel couldn't stop himself. Shame, fury, and a
premonition of disaster were pulsing uncontrollably in his breast. Mickie my creation. Mickie my failure, my fellow prisoner, my spy, coming here to accuse me in my own safe house!

“You know what, Mickie? A suit from me, it doesn't advertise the man, it
defines
him. Maybe you don't want to be defined. Maybe there isn't
enough
of you to define.”

Laughter from the stalls. There was enough of Mickie to define anything several times over.

“A suit from me, Mickie, it's not a drunken scream. It's line, it's form, it's rock of eye, it's silhouette. It's the understatement that tells the world what it needs to know about you and no more. Old Braithwaite called it discretion. If somebody
notices
a suit of mine, I'm embarrassed because there must be something wrong with it. My suits aren't about improving your appearance or about making you the prettiest boy in the room. My suits are not confrontational. They hint. They imply. They encourage people to come to you. They help you improve your life, pay your debts, be an influence in the world. Because when it's my turn to follow old Braithwaite to the great sweatshop in the sky, I want to believe there are people down here in the street walking around, wearing my suits and having a better opinion of themselves on account of them.”

Too much to keep inside me, Mickie. Time you shared the burden. He took a breath and seemed to want to check himself because he gave a kind of hiccough. He began again but Mickie mercifully got there first.

“Harry,” he whispered. “I swear to God. It's the pants. That's all it is. They make me look like an old man. Old before my time. Don't give me all that philosophical horseshit. I know it already.”

Then a bugle must have sounded in Pendel's head. He looked round him at the astonished faces of his customers, he looked at Mickie staring at him, clutching the contested alpaca trousers exactly as he had once clutched to himself the too-big orange trousers of his prison uniform as if he were afraid somebody would snatch them from him. He saw Marta motionless as a sculpture,
her smashed face a patchwork of disapproval and alarm. He lowered his fists to his sides and drew himself to his full height as a prelude to standing comfortably.

“Mickie. Those trousers are going to be perfect,” he assured him in a gentler tone. “I didn't want us in a houndstooth, but you would have it and you're not wrong. The entire world will love you in those trousers. The jacket too. Mickie, listen to me. Somebody's got to be in charge of this suit, you or me. Now who's it to be?”

“Jesus,” Mickie whispered, and slunk out on Rafi's arm.

The shop emptied and settled for its afternoon sleep, the customers withdrew. Money must be made, mistresses and wives placated, deals struck, horses backed, gossip traded. Marta too had disappeared. Her study time. Gone to put her head inside her books. Back in his cutting room Pendel switched on Stravinsky, cleared his tabletop of brown paper templates, cloth, chalk and scissors. Opening his tailor's notebook at the back pages he flattened it at the point where his coded jottings began. If he was chastened by his assault on his old friend he did not allow himself to know it. His muse was calling to him.

From a ring-backed invoice book he extracted a page of ruled paper with the nearly royal crest of the house of Pendel & Braithwaite at its head, and below it in Pendel's copperplate hand an Account Rendered to Mr. Andrew Osnard in the sum of two and a half thousand dollars at the address of his private apartment in Paitilla. Having set the invoice flat on the work surface he took up an elderly pen attributed by mythic history to Braithwaite and, in an archaic hand that he had long cultivated for tailoring communications, added the words “Your early attention would oblige,” which was a sign to say there's more to this bill than a demand for money. From a folder in the centre drawer of his desk he then drew a sheet of white, unruled, unwatermarked paper from the packet that Osnard had given him and sniffed it, which
he always did. It smelled of nothing he recognised except, very distantly, prison disinfectant.

Impregnated with magical substances, Harry. Carbon paper without carbon, for onetime use only.

What do you do your end when you get it, then?

Develop it, you ass, what do you think?

Where, Andy? How?

Mind your own bloody business. In my bathroom. Shut up, you're embarrassing.

Laying the carbon gingerly over the invoice, he took from his drawer the 2H pencil that Osnard had given him for the purpose and began writing to the resounding chords of Stravinsky, until Stravinsky suddenly annoyed him so he switched him off. The devil always has the best tunes, Auntie Ruth used to say. He put on Bach, but Louisa was passionate about Bach, so he switched off Bach and worked in friendless silence, which was unusual in him. Brows down, tip of tongue protruding, Mickie determinedly forgotten, the fluence beginning to rise in him. Listening for a suspicious footfall or the telltale shuffle of an enemy eavesdropper the other side of the door. Glancing constantly between the hieroglyphics in his notebook and the carbon. Inventing and joining. Organising, repairing. Perfecting. Enlarging out of recognition. Distorting. Making order out of confusion. So much to tell. So little time. Japs in every cupboard. The Mainland Chinese abetting them. Pendel flying. Now on top of his material, now under it. Now genius, now slavish editor of his imaginings, master of his cloud kingdom, prince and menial in one. The black cat always at his side. And the French as usual somewhere in the plot. An explosion, Harry boy, an explosion of the flesh. A rage of power, a swelling up, a letting go, a setting free. A bestriding of the earth, a proving of God's grace, a settling of debts. The sinful vertigo of creativity, of plundering and stealing and distorting and reinventing, performed by one transported, deliriously consenting, furious
adult with his atonement pending and the cat swishing its tail. Change the carbon, screw up the old one, toss it in the wastebasket. Reload and resume firing on all guns. Rip the pages from the notebook, burn them in the grate.

“You want a coffee?” Marta enquired.

The world's greatest conspirator had forgotten to lock his door. Flames rising in the grate behind him. Charred paper waiting to be crushed.

“A coffee would be nice. Thank you.”

She closed the door behind her. Stiffly, not smiling at all.

“Do you need help?”

Her eyes were avoiding him. He took a breath.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“If the Japanese were secretly planning to build a new sea-level canal and had bought the Panamanian government on the sly and the students got to hear of it, what would they do?”

“
Today's
students?”

“Yours. The ones who talk to the fishermen.”

“Riot. Take to the streets. Attack the Presidential Palace, storm the Legislative Assembly, block the Canal, call a general strike, summon support from other countries in the region, launch an anticolonial crusade across Latin America. Demand a free Panama. We would also burn all Japanese shops and hang the traitors, starting with the President. Is that enough?”

“Thank you. I'm sure that will be fine. And muster the people from the other side of the bridge, obviously,” he suggested as an afterthought.

“Naturally. Students are only the vanguard of the proletarian movement.”

“I'm sorry about Mickie,” Pendel muttered after a pause. “I couldn't stop myself.”

“When we can't hurt our enemies we hurt our friends. As long as you know that.”

“I do.”

“The Bear rang.”

“About his article?”

“He didn't mention the article. He said he needs to see you. Soon. He's in his usual place. He made it sound like a threat.”

17

The “Boulevard Balboa” on the Avenida Balboa was a low, sparse brasserie with a polystyrene ceiling and prison strip lights boxed in with wooden slats. Some years ago it had been blown up, nobody remembered why. The big windows looked across the Avenida Balboa to the sea. At a long table, a heavy-jowled man protected by black-suited bodyguards in sunglasses was pontificating to a television camera. The Bear sat in his own space, reading his own newspaper. The tables around him were empty. He was wearing a P & B striped blazer and a sixty-dollar Panama hat from the boutique. His shiny pitch-black pirate beard looked as if it had just been shampooed. It matched the jet-black frames of his spectacles.

“You rang, Teddy,” Pendel reminded him after a minute of sitting unnoticed on the wrong side of the newspaper.

The newspaper reluctantly descended.

“What about?” the Bear asked.

“You phoned, I came. The jacket looks nice, then.”

“Who bought the rice farm?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Abraxas?”

“Of course not.”

“Why of course not?”

“He's running out.”

“Who says?”

“He does.”

“Maybe you pay Abraxas. Maybe he works for you. You got some racket with Abraxas? You doing drugs together like his father?”

“Teddy, I think you're out of your mind.”

“How did you pay off Rudd? Who's this mad millionaire you boast about without giving Rudd a piece of the action? That was most offensive. Why have you opened this ridiculous clubroom above your shop? Have you sold out to somebody? What's going on?”

“I'm a tailor, Teddy. I make clothes for gentlemen and I'm expanding. Are you going to give me some nice free publicity, then? There was an article in the
Miami Herald
not a long time back, I don't know if it came your way.”

The Bear sighed. His voice was inert. Compassion, humanity, curiosity, had all drained out of it long ago, if they had ever been there in the first place.

“Let me explain the principles of journalism,” he said. “I make money two ways. One way, people pay me to write stories, so I write them. I hate writing but I must eat, I must finance my appetites. Another way, people pay me not to write stories. For me, that's the better way, because I don't have to write anything and I still get the money. If I play my cards right I get more for not writing than for writing. There's a third way I don't like. I call it my last recourse. I go to certain people in government and offer to sell them what I know. But that way's unsatisfactory.”

“Why?”

“I don't like selling in the dark. If I deal with somebody ordinary—with you—with him over there—and I know I can ruin his reputation or his business or his marriage, and he knows it too, then the story has its price, we can agree on something, it's normal commercial discourse. But when I go to the certain people in government”—very slightly, he shook his long head in disapproval—“I don't know what it's worth to them. Some of them are smart. Some are donkeys. You don't know whether they're ignorant or they're not telling you. So it's bluff, it's counterbluff, it's
time-consuming. Maybe they also threaten me with my own dossier in order to beat me down. I don't like wasting my life that way. You want to do business, you want to give me a quick answer and save me trouble, I'll give you a good price. Since you have a mad millionaire at your disposal, clearly he must be factored into any objective assessment of your means.”

Pendel had the sensation of putting his smile together by numbers, first one side, then the other side, then the cheeks and, when he allowed them to focus, the eyes. Finally his voice.

“Teddy, I think what you're trying to pull here is a very old confidence trick. You're telling me ‘Fly, fly, all is known,' and reckoning you'll move into my house while I'm on my way to the airport.”