The Tailor of Panama (42 page)

20

They lay in the room for finishing hands, on the floor, on a pile of rugs which the Cuna Indian women kept for the influx of cousins, aunts, and uncles from San Blas. Above them hung ranks of tailored suits awaiting buttonholes. The only light came through the skylight, and it was pink from the city's glow. The only sounds came from the traffic in the Vía España, and Marta's mewing in his ear. They were dressed. Her smashed face was buried in his neck. She was trembling. So was Pendel. They were one cold scared body together. They were children in an empty house.

“They said you were cheating on your taxes,” she said. “I told them you paid your taxes. ‘I keep the books,' I said. ‘I know.' ” She broke off in case he wanted to say something but he had nothing to say. “They said you were cheating on your employer's insurance for the staff. I said, ‘I do the insurance. The insurance is in order.' They said I shouldn't ask questions, they had a file on me and I needn't think that because I had been beaten once I was immune.” She moved her head against him. “I hadn't asked any questions. They said they would write in the file that I had Castro and Che Guevara on my bedroom wall. They said I was going around with radical students again. I said I wasn't, which is true. They said you were a spy. They said Mickie was another. They said his drunkenness was just a trick to hide his spying. They're mad.”

She had finished, but it took Pendel time to understand this, so there was a delay before he rolled onto her and with both
hands pressed her cheek against his own, making their faces into a single face.

“Did they say what sort of spy?”

“What other sorts are there?”

“Real ones.”

The phone was ringing.

It rang above their heads, which telephones in Pendel's life didn't normally do, on an instrument that he always thought of as internal until he remembered that his Cuna women lived on the telephone, rejoiced in it, wept into it, hung on its every word as they listened to husbands, lovers, fathers, chiefs, children, headmen and an infinite number of relations with insoluble personal problems. And after the telephone had rung awhile—forever, in the arbitrary measurements of his personal existence, but in the rest of the world four times—he noticed that Marta was no longer in his arms but standing, buttoning her blouse for decency while she prepared to take the call. And she wished to know whether he was here or somewhere else, a thing she always asked if a call appeared inconvenient. Then a stubbornness took hold of him and he stood up also, with the result that they were close again, as they had been when they were lying down.

“
I am here and you are not,
” he said emphatically into her ear.

Not a trick, not an affectation: just the protector in him speaking from the heart. As a precaution he then interposed himself between Marta and the telephone, and by the pink glow of the skylight directly above him—a few stars had made it through the haze—he considered the instrument while it went on ringing, and tried to fathom its purpose. Think the worst threats first, Osnard had said in their training sessions. So he thought them, and the worst threat seemed to be Osnard himself, so he thought Osnard. Then he thought the Bear. Then he thought the police. And then, because he had been thinking of her all along, he thought Louisa.

But Louisa wasn't a threat. She was a casualty he had created long ago, in collaboration with her mother and father and Braithwaite and Uncle Benny and the Sisters of Charity and all the other people who made up the person he himself had become. And she didn't threaten him so much as remind him of the mistaken nature of their relationship, and how it had gone so wrong in spite of all the care he had put into composing it, which was the mistake he had been thinking of: we shouldn't
compose
relationships, but if we don't, what else do we do?

So finally, when there was nothing much left to think about, Pendel reached for the telephone and picked it up at much the same moment that Marta picked up his other hand and held its knuckles to her lips and bared teeth, investing them with light, swift, reassuring bites. And her gesture roused him in some way, for with the phone to his ear he straightened instead of
drucken
ing himself and spoke in a bold, clear, not to say playful Spanish voice designed to show that there was fight in him yet, not just an endless submission to circumstance.

“Pendel & Braithwaite here! Good evening and how can we be of service to you?”

But if his gay humour was subconsciously intended to draw his attacker's sting, it failed miserably because the shooting had already begun. The first incoming rounds reached him before he had finished speaking: a pattern of deliberate, ascending single explosions interspersed with the chatter of light machine guns, grenades and the short, triumphant whine of ricochets. So for a second or two Pendel assumed it was the invasion all over again; except that this time he had agreed to keep Marta company in El Chorrillo, which was why she was kissing his hand. Then over the sounds of shooting came the predictable whimpering of victims, echoing in a makeshift shelter of some kind, accusing and protesting and cursing and demanding, choked with horror and outrage, begging for everything from compensation to God's forgiveness, until gradually all these voices became one voice, and it belonged
to Ana,
chiquilla
to Mickie Abraxas, childhood friend to Marta and the one woman left in Panama who would put up with him, and clean him when he was sick from too much of whatever he had been taking, and listen to his ramblings.

And from the moment Pendel recognised Ana he knew exactly what she was telling him despite the fact that, like all good storytellers, she kept the best bit till last. Which was why he didn't pass the telephone to Marta but kept it to himself, taking the beating on his own body instead of letting her take it on hers, which was what had happened of necessity when the Dingbats wouldn't allow him to stop them smashing her to pieces.

All the same, Ana's monologue had many paths and Pendel practically needed a map to get through it.

“It's not even my father's house, my father only lent it to me reluctantly because I lied to him, I told him I would be here with my girlfriend Estella and nobody else, Estella who me and Marta went to school with, which was a lie, certainly not Mickie, it belongs to a foreman at the fireworks factory called La Negra Vieja, Guararé is where the fireworks are made for all the festivals in Panama, but this is Guararé's own festival for itself, and my father is a friend of the foreman and was best man at his wedding, and the foreman said have my house for the festival while I go on my honeymoon to Aruba, but my father doesn't like fireworks so he said I could have it instead of him as long as I don't bring that slob Mickie so I lied, I said I wouldn't, I would bring my friend Estella, who was my friend at convent school and is currently the
chiquilla
of a timber merchant in David, because in Guararé for five days you see bullfights and dancing and fireworks like you don't see them anywhere else in Panama or anywhere else in the world. But I didn't bring Estella, I brought Mickie and Mickie really needed me, he was so frightened and depressed and hilarious all at once, saying the police were fools, threatening him and calling him a British spy just like in the days of Noriega, all because he had got
drunk at Oxford for a couple of terms and allowed himself to be talked into running some British club in Panama.”

And here Ana began laughing so loud that Pendel could only piece the story together patchily and with great patience, but the nub of it was clear enough, namely that she had never seen Mickie so high and low at once, one minute weeping and the next wild and full of fun, and God in Heaven, what made him do it? And God in Heaven again, what was she going to tell her father? Who was going to clear up the walls, the ceiling? Thank God it was a tiled floor, not floorboards, at least he'd had the decency to do it in the kitchen, a thousand dollars for a repaint was conservative, and her father a strict Catholic with views about suicide and heretics, all right he'd been drinking, they all had, what do you do at a festival except drink and dance and fuck and watch the fireworks, which was what she was doing when she heard the bang behind her, where did he ever get it from, he never carried a pistol even though he talked a lot about blowing his brains out, he must have bought it after the police called on him and accused him of being this great spy and reminding him what had happened last time he went to gaol, and promising to make it happen again, never mind he wasn't a pretty boy any more, the old convicts weren't picky, she just screamed and laughed and ducked her head and closed her eyes and it wasn't till she turned round to see who'd thrown the rocket or whatever it was, that she saw the mess, some of it on her new dress, and Mickie himself upside down on the floor.

All of which left Pendel wondering strenuously which was the right side up for the exploded corpse of his friend, fellow prisoner and leader-elect of Panama's now forever Silent Opposition.

He replaced the receiver and the invasion ended, the victims stopped complaining. Only mopping up remained. He had written down the address in Guararé with a 2H pencil from his pocket. A thin hard line but legible. Next he worried about money for Marta. Then he remembered the wad of Osnard's fifties in the
right-hand button-down hip pocket of his trousers. So he handed it to her and she took it, probably without knowing what she was doing.

“That was Ana,” he said. “Mickie's killed himself.”

But of course she knew that. She'd had her face pressed against his face while they listened with the same ear, she'd recognised her friend's voice from the first moment and it was only the strength of Pendel's friendship with Mickie that had prevented her from snatching the receiver from his hand.

“It's not your fault,” she said fervently. She repeated it several times in order to drive it into his thick skull. “He'd have done it anyway, whether you told him off or not, d'you hear? He didn't need an excuse. He was killing himself every day. Listen to me.”

“I am. I am.”

But he didn't say: Yes, it
is
my fault, because there seemed no point.

Then she began shivering like a malaria victim, and if he hadn't held her she'd have been on the floor like Mickie, who was upside down.

“I want you to go to Miami tomorrow,” he said. He remembered a hotel that Rafi Domingo had told him about. “Stay at the Grand Bay. It's in Coconut Grove. They do a marvellous buffet lunch,” he added idiotically. And the fallback, the way Osnard had taught him: “If you can't get in, ask the concierge if you can collect messages there. They're nice people. Mention Rafi's name.”

“It's not your fault,” she repeated, weeping now. “They beat him too hard in prison. He was a child. Adults you can beat. Not children. He was fat. He had sensitive skin.”

“I know,” Pendel agreed. “We all have. We shouldn't do it to each other. No one should.”

But his concentration had wandered to the row of suits awaiting the finishing hand, because the biggest and most prominent of them was Mickie's houndstooth alpaca with a second pair of trousers, the ones he said made him look old before his time.

“I'll come with you,” she said. “I can help you. I'll look after Ana.”

He shook his head. Vehemently. He grabbed her arms and shook his head again. I betrayed him. You didn't. I made him leader when you told me not to. He tried to say some of this, but his face must have been saying it already because she was recoiling from him, shaking herself free of him as if she didn't care for what she saw.

“Marta, are you listening? Listen and stop staring at me like that.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Thanks for the students and everything,” he insisted. “Thanks for everything. Thanks. I'm sorry.”

“You'll need petrol,” she said, and gave him a hundred dollars back.

After which they stood there, two people swapping banknotes while their world was ending.

“It was not necessary to thank me,” she told him, slipping into a stern, retrospective tone. “I love you. Very little else is of consequence to me. Even Mickie.”

She seemed to have thought it through, for her body eased and the love had come back to her eyes.

It is the same night and the same hour exactly in the British Embassy in Calle 53 in Marbella, Panama City. The urgently convened meeting of the augmented Buchaneers has been running for an hour, though in Osnard's cheerless, airless, windowless barrack in the east wing Francesca Deane has constantly to remind herself that nothing has changed in the ordinary procedures of the world, it is the same time outside the room as it is in here, whether or not, in the calmest and most reasonable way, we are plotting the arming and financing of a group of supersecret ruling-class Panamanian dissidents known as the Silent Opposition, and the raising and recruitment of militant students, and the overthrow of the legitimate government of Panama, and the installation of a Provisional Committee of Administration pledged to wrest the Canal from the scheming clutches of an East-South conspiracy.

Men in secret conclave enter an altered state, thought Fran, as the only woman present, discreetly examining the faces squeezed round the too small table. It's in the shoulders, how they stiffen against the neck. It's in the muscles round the jaw and the dirty shadows round the faster, lustful eyes. I'm the only black in a roomful of whites. Her eyes skimmed past Osnard without seeing him and she remembered the look in the face of the woman croupier in the third casino:
So you're his girl,
it said.
Well, I'll tell you something, darling. Your man and I get up to things you wouldn't know about in your dirtiest dreams.

Men in secret conclave treat you like the woman they're saving from the flames, she thought. Whatever they've done to you, they expect you to think they're perfect. I should be standing on the doorstep of their croft. I should be wearing a long white dress and clutching their babies to my bosom as I wave them off to war. I should be saying: Hullo, I'm Fran; I'm the first prize when you come home victorious. Men in secret conclave have a waxy guilt imparted by low white lighting and a weird grey steel cabinet on Meccano legs that hums like a tuneless house-painter up a ladder in order to protect our words from prying ears. Men in secret conclave give off a different smell. They are men in heat.