The Tailor of Panama (37 page)

“Are you working for the Americans? The certain people in government wouldn't like that. An Englishman trespassing on their preserves, they'd take a strong line. It's different if they do it themselves. They're betraying their own country. That's their choice, they were born here, it's their country, they can do what they like with it, they've worked their way. But for you to come here as a foreigner and betray it for them would be extremely provocative. There's no knowing what they might do.”

“Teddy, you are right. I'm proud to say I am working for the Americans. The General in charge of Southern Command likes a plain single-breasted with the extra trousers and what he calls the vest. The chargé, he's a mohair tux and a tweed jacket for his holidays in North Haven.”

Pendel stood up and felt the backs of his knees trembling against his trousers.

“You don't know anything bad about me, Teddy. If you did, you wouldn't be asking. And the reason you don't know anything bad is that there isn't anything to know. And while we're on the subject of money, I'd be grateful if you'd pay for that nice jacket you're wearing, so that Marta can clear her books.”

“How you can fuck that faceless halfbreed is beyond me.”

Pendel left the Bear as he had found him, head back, beard up, reading what he had written in his newspaper.

Arriving home, Pendel is pained to be greeted by an empty house. And this is my reward for a day's hard toil? he demands of the empty walls. A man with two professions, working himself to a shadow, must bring his own food home in the evenings? But there are consolations. Louisa's father's briefcase is once more lying on her desk. Popping it open, he takes out a hefty office diary with
Dr. E. Delgado
done in black Gothic lettering on the cover. Next to it nestles a file of correspondence marked “Engagements.” Ignoring distractions, including the imminent threat of exposure by the Bear, Pendel wills himself once more to become all spy. The overhead light is on a dimmer switch. He turns it to full. Pressing Osnard's cigarette lighter to one eye, he closes the other and squints through the tiny peephole while trying to keep his nose and fingers out of the way of the lens.

“Mickie rang,” Louisa said in bed.

“Rang where?”

“Me. At the office. He's going to kill himself again.”

“Oh, right.”

“He says you've gone mad. He says somebody's stolen your head.”

“That's nice, then.”

“And I agreed,” she said, putting out the light.

It was Sunday night and their third casino, but Andy still hadn't put God to the test, which was what he had promised Fran he was going to do. She had barely seen him all weekend, apart from a few stolen hours of sleep and a bout of frenzied early-morning lovemaking before he hurried back to work. The rest of his weekend had been spent in the embassy, with Shepherd in his Fair Isle pullover and black running shoes bringing hot towels and cups of
coffee. Or so at least Fran had pictured it. It wasn't kind of her to put Shepherd in black running shoes because she had never seen him wearing them. But she remembered a physical training instructor at boarding school who had worn them and Shepherd had the same servile enthusiasm.

“Heavy batch o'
BUCHAN
stuff,” Andy had explained cryptically. “Got to knock it into report form. All a bit tense and get-it-to-us-byyesterday.”

“When do the Buchaneers have the benefit?”

“London's pulled down the shutters. Too hot for local consumption till the analysts have run it through the sheep dip.”

And so matters had rested till two hours ago, when Andy had swept her off to an amazingly expensive restaurant on the waterfront, where, over a bottle of expensive champagne, he had decided it was time to put God to the test.

“Picked up a legacy from an aunt last week. Piddling sum. No good to anyone. Get God to double it. Only way.”

He was in his hell-bent mood. Restless, questing eyes, flaring at anything, spoiling for collision.

“Do you take requests?” he yelled at the bandleader while they danced.

“Whatever madame desires, señor.”

“Then why not take the night off?” Andy suggested as Fran swung him smartly out of earshot.

“Andy, that's not tempting God, that's asking to get us killed,” she told him severely while he paid for dinner with damp fifty-dollar bills dragged from the inside pocket of a new linen jacket by his local tailor.

In the first casino he sat at the big table, watching but not playing while Fran stood protectively behind him.

“Got a favourite colour?” he asked her over his shoulder.

“Isn't that for God to decide?”

“We do the colour, God does the luck. Rule o' the game.”

He drank more champagne but didn't place a bet. They know him, she thought suddenly as they left. He's been here before. She could tell by their faces and knowing smiles and come-again-soons.

“Operational,” he said curtly when she taxed him.

At the second casino a security guard made the mistake of trying to frisk them. Things would have turned ugly if Fran had not produced her diplomatic card. Once again Andy watched the play but took no active part, while two girls at the end of the table kept trying to catch his eye and one even called to him. “Hi, Andy.”

“Operational,” he repeated.

The third casino was in a hotel she'd never heard of, in a bad part of town she had been told not to enter, in room 303 on the third floor, knock and wait. A huge bruiser patted Andy down and this time he did not object. He even advised Fran to let the man inspect her handbag. The croupiers stiffened as Fran and Andy entered the second room, and a serious hush fell, turning heads and ending conversations: which was not surprising when you realised that Andy was asking for fifty thousand dollars' worth o' chips in five hundreds and thousands, don't need those little ones, thanks, you can put 'em back where they came from.

And the next thing Fran knew, Andy was sitting at the croupier's side and she was again standing behind him, and the croupier was a doughy, voluptuous whore with thick lips and a low halter dress and small fluttery hands with red fingernails cut like claws, and the wheel was spinning. And when it stopped, Andy was ten thousand dollars better off because he was backing red. He played, so far as she could afterwards establish, eight or nine times. He had changed from champagne to Scotch. He doubled his fifty thousand dollars, which was apparently what he had set God as a target, then gave himself one last fling for a bit o' fun and picked up another twenty thousand. He asked for a carrier bag and a taxi at the door, because he thought it would be silly to walk down the road with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a bag and said Shepherd could fetch the bloody car tomorrow or give it away, he hated it.

But the sequence of these events remained disordered in Fran's mind because all she could concentrate on while they were unfolding was her very first gymkhana, when her pony, which like every other pony in the world was called Misty, took the first fence perfectly, then bolted four miles down the main road to Shrewsbury with Fran hanging on to its neck and the traffic going past in both directions and nobody seeming to give a damn except herself.

“The Bear came to my flat last night,” Marta said, having closed Pendel's cutting-room door behind her. “He brought a friend in the police.”

It was Monday morning. Pendel sat at his worktable, adding the finishing touches to an order of battle of the Silent Opposition. He put down his 2H pencil.

“Why? What are you supposed to have done?”

“They wanted to know about Mickie.”

“What about him?”

“Why he comes to the shop so much. Why he calls you at such crazy hours.”

“What did you tell them?”

“They want me to spy on you,” she said.

18

The arrival of the first material from Panama Station to bear the code name
BUCHAN TWO
had raised Scottie Luxmore, its originating genius in London, to unprecedented heights of self-congratulation. But this morning his euphoria had given way to a fretful nervousness. He paced at twice his usual speed. His hortatory Scottish voice had acquired a creak. His gaze veered restlessly across the river, northward and westward where his future now lay.

“
Cherchez la femme,
Johnny boy,” he advised a haggard youth named Johnson, who had succeeded Osnard in the ungrateful post of Luxmore's personal assistant. “The female of the species is worth five men in this business any day.”

Johnson, who like his predecessor had mastered the essential art of sycophancy, leaned forward in his chair to show how keenly he was listening.

“They have the perfidy, Johnny. They have the nerve, they are born dissemblers. Why do you suppose she insisted on working exclusively through her husband?” His voice had the protest of a man pleading excuses in advance. “She knew very well she would outshine him. Where would
he
be then? On the pavement. Dispensed with. Paid off. Why should she let that happen?” He wiped his open palms down the sides of his trousers. “Swap two salaries for one and make a fool of her man while she's about it? Not our Louisa. Not our
BUCHAN TWO
!” His eyes narrowed, as if he had recognised someone at a distant window. But his
peroration did not pause. “I knew what I was doing. So did she. Never underrate a woman's intuition, Johnny. He's reached his ceiling. He's played out.”

“Osnard?” said Johnson hopefully. It was six months since he had been assigned to Luxmore's shadow, and still no posting was in sight for him.

“Her husband, Johnny,” Luxmore retorted irritably, and drew the tips of his fingers in a clawing gesture down one side of his bearded cheek. “
BUCHAN ONE
. Oh, his work was promising enough at first. But he'd no breadth of vision, they never have. No scale. No awareness of history. It was all tittle-tattle and warmedup leftovers and covering his own backside. We could never have stuck with him, I see that now. She saw it too. She knows her man, that woman. Knows his limitations better than we do. And her own strength.”

“The analysts are a bit worried there's no collateral,” ventured Johnson, who could never resist a chance to chip at Osnard's pedestal. “Sally Morpurgo called the
BUCHAN TWO
stuff overwritten and undersourced.”

The shot caught Luxmore on the turn, just as he was beginning his fifth length of the carpet. He smiled the broad, blank smile of an entirely humourless man.

“Did she now? And Miss Morpurgo is a most intelligent person, no question.”

“Well, I think she is.”

“And women are harsher on other women than we men are. Rightly.”

“It's true. I hadn't thought of it till now.”

“They are also subject to certain jealousies—envy is perhaps the better word here—from which we men are naturally immune. Are we not, Johnny?”

“I expect so. No. Yes, I mean.”

“What is Miss Morpurgo's objection precisely?” Luxmore asked in the tone of a man who can take fair criticism.

Johnson wished he had kept his mouth shut.

“She just says, well, there's no collateral. From the entire daily deluge, as she called it. Zero. No sigint, no friendly liaison, not a squeak out of the Americans. No travel int, no satellites, no unusual diplomatic traffic. It's Black Hole stuff all the way.
She
says.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, not quite, actually.”

“Don't spare me, Johnny.”

“She said that never in the whole history of human intelligence had so much been paid for so little. It was a joke.”

If Johnson had hoped to undermine Luxmore's confidence in Osnard and his works, he was disappointed. Luxmore's breast swelled and his voice recovered its didactic Scottish pulse.

“Johnny.” A suck of the front teeth. “Has it ever occurred to you that a proven negative today is the equivalent of yesterday's proven positive?”

“No, it hasn't, actually.”

“Then reflect for a moment, I beseech you. It takes a crafty mind indeed, Johnny, to hide his tracks from the ears and eyes of modern technology, does it not? From credit cards to travel tickets, telephone calls, fax machines, banks, hotels, you name it. We cannot buy a bottle of whisky at the supermarket these days without advising the world that we have done so. ‘No trace' in such circumstances comes close to proof of guilt. These men of the world understand that. They know what it takes to be unseen, unheard, unknown.”

“I'm sure they do, sir,” Johnson said.

“Men of the world do not suffer from the professional deformities which beset the more inward-looking officers of this Service, Johnny. They are not bunker minded, bogged down in detail and superfluous information. They see the forest, not the trees. And what they see here is an East-South cabal of perilous dimensions.”

“Sally doesn't,” Johnson objected doggedly, deciding that he might as well be hanged for a pound as a penny. “Nor does Moo.”

“Who is
Moo
?”

“Her assistant.”

Luxmore's smile remained tolerant and kindly. He too, it said, saw forests and not trees.

“Turn your own question inside out, Johnny, and I think you will have your answer. Why is there an underground Panamanian opposition if there is nothing in Panama to oppose? Why do clandestine dissident groups—not riffraff, Johnny, but drawn from the concerned and affluent classes—wait in the wings, unless they know what there is to wait for? Why are the fishermen restive?— canny men, Johnny, never underrate your man of the sea. Why does the Panamanian President's man on the Canal Commission profess one policy in public while his private engagement book professes another? Why does he live one life on the surface and another below the waterline, hiding his tracks, conferring at unsociable hours with spurious Japanese harbourmasters? Why are the students restless? What is it they are sniffing in the air? Who has been whispering to them in their cafés and their discotheques? Why is the word ‘sellout' passed from mouth to mouth?”