The Tailor of Panama (48 page)

“What about passing the word to Van?” said Hatry, wiping a piece of bread round his plate.

“Well,
I
think, Ben—the
best
thing in this case is to let Brother Van read it in your newspapers,” said Cavendish in a series of dancing little phrases. “
Do
excuse me, I'm
so
sorry,” he added to Johnson, stepping over his feet. “
Must
just telephone.”

He said sorry to the waiter too and took his double damask napkin with him in his haste. And Johnson not long afterwards was sacked, nobody was ever quite sure why. Ostensibly, it was for riding around London with a decoded text that was complete with all its symbols and operational code names. Unofficially, he was held to be a little too excitable for secret work. But probably it was barging into the Connaught Grill Room in a sports coat that was held to be the most grave of these offences.

22

To reach the fireworks festival at Guararé in the Panamanian province of Los Santos, which forms part of a stunted peninsula on the southwest tip of the Gulf of Panama, Harry Pendel drove by way of Uncle Benny's house in Leman Street which smelled of burning coal, the Sisters of Charity orphanage, several East End synagogues and a succession of grossly overcrowded British penal institutions under the generous patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. All these establishments and others lay in the jungle blackness either side of him and on the pitted winding road ahead of him, on hilltops cut against a star-strewn sky and on the steel-grey ironing board of the Pacific under a very clean new moon.

The difficult drive was made harder for him by the clamour of his children demanding songs and funny voices from the back of the four-track, and by the well-meant exhortations of his unhappy wife which rang in his ears even on the most desolate parts of his journey: go slower, watch out for that deer, monkey, buck, dead horse, metre-long green iguana or family of six Indians on one bicycle, Harry, I do not understand why you have to drive at seventy miles an hour to keep an appointment with a dead man, and if it's the fireworks you're afraid of missing, you should please to know that the festival continues for five nights and five days and this is the first night and if we don't get there till tomorrow the children will entirely understand.

To this was added Ana's unbroken monologue of grief, the terrible forbearance of Marta asking him for nothing he wasn't able to give,
and the presence of Mickie, slumped huge and morose in the passenger seat beside him, riding up against him with his spongy shoulder whenever they negotiated a bend or bounced over a pothole, and asking him in a glum refrain why he didn't make suits the way Armani did.

His feelings about Mickie were terrible and overwhelming. He knew that in all of Panama and in all his life he had only ever had one friend, and now he had killed him. He saw no difference anymore between the Mickie he had loved and the Mickie he had invented, except that the Mickie he had loved was better, and the Mickie he had invented was some sort of mistaken homage, an act of vanity on Pendel's part: to create a champion out of his best friend, to show Osnard what grand company he kept. Because Mickie had been a hero in his own right. He had never needed Pendel's fluence. Mickie had stood up and been counted when it mattered, as a reckless opponent of the tyranny. He had richly earned his beatings and imprisonment, and his right to be drunk forever after. And to buy however many fine suits he needed to take away the scratch and stink of prison uniform. It was not Mickie's fault that he was weak where Pendel had painted him strong, or that he had given up the struggle where Pendel's fictions had painted him continuing it. If only I'd left him alone, he thought. If only I'd never fiddled with him, then chewed his head off because I had the guilts.

Somewhere at the foot of Ancón Hill he had filled the four-track with enough petrol to last him the rest of his life and given a dollar to a black beggar with white hair and one ear eaten off by leprosy or a wild animal or a disenchanted wife. At Chame, through sheer inattention, he shot a customs roadblock, and at Penonomé he became aware of a pair of lynxes riding on his left taillight—lynxes being young, very slim, American-trained policemen in black leather who ride two to a motorcycle, carry submachine guns and are famous for being polite to tourists and killing muggers, dopers and assassins—but tonight, it seemed, also murderous British spies. The lynx in front does the driving, the lynx on the pillion does the
killing, Marta had explained to him, and he remembered this as they pulled alongside and he saw the fish-eye reflection of his own face floating among the streetlights in the liquid blackness of their visors. Then he remembered that lynxes only operated in Panama City and he fell to wondering whether they were on a jaunt of some kind or whether they had followed him out here in order to shoot him in privacy. But he never had an answer to his question because when he looked again they had returned to the blackness they had sprung from, leaving him the pitted, twisting road, the dead dogs in his headlights and the bush that was so dense to either side you saw no tree trunks, just black walls and eyes of animals and, through the open sunroof, heard the exchange of insults between species. Once he saw an owl that had been crucified to an electricity pole and its breast and the inside of its wings were white as a martyr's and its eyes were open. But whether it belonged to a recurring nightmare he had, or was the ultimate incarnation of it, remained a mystery.

After that Pendel must have dozed for a time and probably he took a wrong turning as well, because when he looked again he was on family holiday in Parita two years ago, picnicking with Louisa and the children on a grass square surrounded by one-storey houses with raised verandahs and stone mounting blocks for getting on and off your horse without spoiling your nice clean shoes. In Parita an old witch in a black hood had told Hannah that the people of the town put young boa constrictors under their roof tiles to catch mice, at which Hannah refused to enter any house in town, not for an ice cream, not for a pee. She was so scared that instead of attending Mass as they had planned, they had to stand outside the church and wave at an old man in the white bell tower, who tolled the big bell with one hand while he waved back at them with the other, which they all afterwards agreed was better than going to Mass. And when he had finished with his bell he gave them an amazing slow-motion performance of an orangutan, first swinging from an iron crossbar, then fleaing himself, armpits, head and crotch, and eating the fleas between searches.

Passing Chitré, Pendel remembered the shrimp farm where shrimps laid their eggs in the trunks of mangrove trees and Hannah had asked whether they got pregnant first. And after the shrimps he remembered a kind Swedish horticulturist lady who told them about the orchid called Little Prostitute of the Night, because by day it smelled of nothing but at night no decent person would let it into the house.

“Harry, it will not be necessary for you to explain this to our children. They are exposed to quite enough explicit material as it is.”

But Louisa's strictures made no difference because all week long Mark had called Hannah his
putita de noche
, till Pendel told him to shut up.

And after Chitré came the battle zone: first the approaching red sky, then the rumble of ordnance, then the glow of flares as he was waved through one police checkpoint after another on his road to Guararé.

Pendel was walking, and people in white were walking beside him, leading him to the gallows. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself so reconciled to death. If he ever lived his life again, he decided, he would insist on a brand-new actor in the leading role. He was walking to the gallows and there were angels at his side, and they were Marta's angels, he recognised them at once, the true heart of Panama, the people who lived the other side of the bridge, didn't take bribes or give them, made love to the people they loved, got pregnant and didn't have abortions, and come to think of it, Louisa would admire them too, if only she could jump over the fences that confined her—but who can? We're born into prison, every one of us, sentenced to life from the moment we open our eyes, which was what made him so sad when he looked at his own children. But these children were different and they were angels and he was very glad to be meeting them in the last hours of his life. He had never doubted that Panama had more angels per acre, more white crinolines and flowered headdresses, perfect shoulders,
cooking smells, music, dancing, laughter, more drunks, malign policemen and lethal fireworks than any comparable paradise twenty times its size, and here they were assembled to escort him. And he was very gratified to discover bands playing, and competing folk dance teams, with gangly, romantic-eyed black men in cricket blazers and white shoes and flat hands that lovingly moulded the air round their partners' gyrating haunches. And to see that the double doors of the church were pulled open to give the Holy Virgin a grandstand view of the bacchanalia outside, whether She wanted it or not. The angels were evidently determined She should not lose touch with ordinary life, warts and all.

He was walking slowly, as condemned men will, keeping to the centre of the street and smiling. He was smiling because everybody else was smiling, and because one discourteous gringo who refuses to smile amid a crowd of ridiculously beautiful Spanish-Indian
mestizo
revellers is an endangered species. And Marta was right, these were the most beautiful and virtuous and unsullied people on earth, as Pendel had already observed. To die among them would be a privilege. He would ask to be buried the other side of the bridge.

Twice he enquired after the way. Each time he was sent in a different direction. The first time, a group of angels earnestly pointed him across the middle of the square, where he became the moving target for salvos of multi-warhead rockets fired at head height from windows and doorways on all four sides of him. And though he laughed and grinned and covered up and gave every sign of taking the joke in good part, it was actually a miracle that he reached the opposite bank with both eyes, ears and balls in place and not a burn on him, because the rockets were not a joke at all and there was no laughter to say they were. They were red-hot, highvelocity missiles spewing molten flame, fired at short range under the guidance of a knobbly-kneed, freckled, red-haired Amazon in frayed shorts who was the self-appointed mistress-gunner of a wellarmed unit, and she was trailing her lethal rockets in a string like a tail behind her back while she lewdly pranced and gesticulated. She
was smoking—what substance was anybody's guess—and between puffs she was screaming orders to her troops around the square: “Cut his cock off, bring the gringo to his knees—” then another drag of cigarette smoke and the next command. But Pendel was a good chap and these were angels.

And the second time he asked the way he was shown a row of houses that lined one side of the square, with verandahs occupied by overdressed
rabiblancos
slumming it, with their shiny BMWs parked alongside, and Pendel as he walked past one noisy verandah after another kept thinking:
I
know you, you're So-and-so's son, or daughter, my goodness how time passes. But their presence, when he thought about it more, did not concern him, neither did he care whether they spotted him in return, because the house where Mickie had shot himself was just a few doors along on his left, which was a very good reason to concentrate his thoughts exclusively on a sex-driven fellow prisoner called Spider, who'd hanged himself in his cell while Pendel was sleeping three feet away from him, Spider's being the only dead body Pendel had had to handle at close quarters. So it was Spider's fault in a way that Pendel in his distraction found that he had wandered into the middle of an informal police cordon consisting of a police car, a ring of bystanders, and about twenty policemen who couldn't possibly have all fitted into the car but, as policemen are wont to do in Panama, had collected like gulls around a fishing boat the moment there was a smell of profit or excitement in the air.

The point of attraction was a dazed old peasant seated on the curb with his straw hat between his knees and his face in his hands, and he was roaring a lament in gorilla-like gusts of rage. Gathered round him were some dozen advisors and spectators and consultants, including several drunks who needed one another's support to remain upright, and an old woman presumably his wife who was loudly agreeing with the old man whenever he let her get a word in. And since the police were disinclined to clear a path through the group, and certainly not through their own ranks, Pendel had no
option but to become a bystander himself though not an active participant in the debate. The old man was quite badly burned. Every time he took his hands from his face to make a point or rebut one it was easy to see he had been burned. A large patch of skin was missing from his left cheek and the wound extended southward into the open neck of his collarless shirt. And because he was burned, the police were proposing to take him to the local hospital where he would receive an injection which, as everyone agreed, was the appropriate remedy for a burn.

But the old man didn't want an injection and he didn't want the remedy. He would rather have the pain than the injection, he would rather get blood poisoning and any other evil after-effect than go with the police to the hospital. And the reason was, he was an old drunk and this was probably the last festival of his life and everyone knew that when you had an injection you couldn't drink for the rest of the festival. He had therefore taken the conscious decision, of which his Maker and his wife were witness, to tell the police to shove the injection up their arses because he preferred to drink himself into a stupor, which would anyway take care of the pain. So he would be obliged if everyone got the hell out of his way please, including the police, and if they really wanted to do him a good turn, the best thing they could do was bring him a drink and another for his wife; a bottle of
seco
would be particularly welcome.