“Ramón’s got you over a barrel. If you don’t pay him off, you’re screwed. If you do pay him off, you’re stuck with a river with no water and a rice farm that can’t grow rice. Not to mention the hairy eyeball from Louisa.”
“It’s a worry to me, Andy. I’ll not deny it. It’s been putting me off my food for weeks.”
“Know who your neighbour is up there?”
“He’s an absentee landlord, Andy. A highly malicious phantom.”
“Know his name?”
Pendel shook his head. “He’s not a person, you see. More a corporation registered in Miami.”
“Know where he banks?”
“Not as such, Andy.”
“With your chum Ramón. It’s Rudd’s company. Rudd owns two thirds, Mr. X owns t’other third. Know who X is?”
“I’m reeling, Andy.”
“How about your farm manager chap? What’s-his-face?”
“Angel? He loves me like a brother.”
“You’ve been conned. Case o’ the biter bit. Think about it.”
“I am doing, Andy. I haven’t thought like this for a long time,” said Pendel as another part of his world keeled over and sank beneath his gaze.
“Anybody been offering to buy the farm off you for peanuts?” Osnard was asking, from behind the wall of mist that had somehow gathered between them.
“My neighbour. Then he’ll put back the water, won’t he, and have a nice viable rice farm worth five times what he gave for it.”
“And Angel running it for him.”
“I’m looking at a circle, Andy. With me in the middle.”
“How big’s your neighbour’s farm?”
“Two hundred acres.”
“What’s he do with it?”
“Cattle. Low upkeep. He doesn’t need the water. He’s just keeping it away from me.”
The prisoner is giving one-line answers while the officer writes them down: except that Osnard doesn’t write anything down. He remembers with his quick brown fox’s eyes.
“Did Rudd put you onto buying your farm in the first place?”
“He said it was cheap. An executors’ sale. Just the place for Louisa’s money. I was green is what I was.”
Osnard drew his balloon glass to his lips, perhaps to mask them. Then he took a suck of air and his voice flattened itself for speed.
“You’re God’s gift, Harry. Classic, ultimate listening post. Wife with access. Contacts to kill for. Chum in the resistance. Girl in the shop who runs with the mob. Behaviour pattern established over ten years. Natural cover, local language, gift o’ the gab, quick on your feet. Never heard anyone pitch the tale better. Be who you are but more of it, and we’ll have the whole o’ Panama stitched up. Plus you’re deniable. You on or not?”
Pendel smirked, partly from the flattery, partly in awe of his predicament. But mostly because he was aware of witnessing a great moment in his life, which, though terrible and cleansing, appeared to be taking place without his participation.
“I’ve been deniable ever since I can remember, if I’m honest, Andy,” he confided, while his mind cruised erratically round the outer edges of his life so far. But he hadn’t said yes.
“Downside is, you’ll be in up to your neck from day one. That going to bother you?”
“I’m up to my neck already, aren’t I? It’s a question of where I’d sooner not be.”
The eyes again, too old, too steady, listening, remembering, smelling, doing all the jobs at once. And Pendel recklessly asserting himself despite them or because of them.
“Though what you’re going to do with a bankrupt listening post is slightly beyond my powers of comprehension,” he declared with the boastful pride of the condemned. “There’s no way out that I know of to save me, short of a mad millionaire.” A needless glance around the room. “See a mad millionaire at all, Andy, among the crowd? I’m not saying they’re all sane, mind. Just not mad in my direction.”
Nothing changed in Osnard. Not his stare, not his voice, not his heavy hands, which sat uncurled and fingers-down on the rich white tablecloth.
“Maybe my outfit’s mad enough,” he said.
Casting round for relief, Pendel’s gaze selected the gruesome figure of the Bear, Panama’s most hated columnist, treading his inconsolable path towards a solitary table in the darkest part of the room. But he still hadn’t said yes, and with one ear he was listening desperately to Uncle Benny: Son, when you meet a con, dangle him. Because there’s nothing a con likes less than being told to come back next week.
“You on or not?”
“I’m thinking, Andy. I’m pondering is what I’m doing.”
“Hell about?”
About being a sober adult making up my mind, he replied truculently in his head. About having a centre and a will instead of a bunch of stupid impulses and bad memories and an excessive dose of fluence.
“I’m weighing my options, Andy. Looking at all sides,” he said loftily.
Osnard is denying accusations nobody has levelled against him. He is doing this in a low wet murmur that perfectly suits his bungy body, but Pendel finds no continuity in his words. It’s a different evening. I was thinking of Benny again. I need to go home to bed.
“We don’t put the hard word on chaps, Harry. Not chaps we like.”
“I never said you did, Andy.”
“Not our style. Hell’s the point o’ leaking your criminal record to the Pans when we want you the way you are and more so?”
“There’s no point at all, Andy, and I’m pleased to hear you say it.”
“Why blow the whistle on old Braithwaite, make a fool o’ you to your wife and kids, break up the happy home? We want you, Harry. You’ve got a hell of a lot to sell. All we want to do is buy it.”
“Sort out the rice farm for me and you can have my head on a charger, Andy,” says Pendel to be companionable.
“No sale, old boy. Need your soul.”
Aping the example of his host, Pendel has taken his brandy glass in both hands and is leaning across the candlelit table. Weighing his decision still. Holding out, even though most of him would like to say yes, just to end the embarrassment of not saying it.
“I haven’t heard you on job description yet, have I, Andy?”
“Listening post. Told you.”
“Yes, but what do you want me to hear, Andy? What’s the bottom line?”
The eyes again, needle sharp. The red sparks back inside. The slouchy jaw, absently masticating while he ruminates. The slumped fat-boy’s body. The trailed, damped-down voice spoken from one corner of the crooked mouth.
“Not a lot. Balance o’ global power in the twenty-first century. Future o’ world trade. Panama’s political chessboard. Silent opposers. Chaps from the other side o’ the bridge, as you call ’em. What’s going to happen when the Yanks pull out? If they do. Who’ll be laughing, who’ll be crying, come midday December thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine? Shape o’ things to come when one o’ the world’s two greatest gateways goes under the hammer and the auction’s run by a bunch o’ wide boys? Piece o’ cake,” he replied, but ending on a question mark, as if the best were yet to come.
Pendel grins in return. “Oh well, there’s no problem, then, is there? We’ll have it all packed and ready for your collection by lunchtime tomorrow. If it doesn’t fit, bring it back as often as you like.”
“Plus a few things that aren’t on the menu,” Osnard adds even more quietly. “Or not yet, shall we say.”
“What are they, then, Andy?”
A shrug. A long, slow, complicitous, insinuating, unnerving policeman’s shrug, expressing false ease, terrible powers and an immense store of superior knowledge.
“Lot o’ different ways to skin a cat, this game. Can’t learn ’em all in a night. That a ‘yes’ I heard, or you doing a Garbo?”
Astonishingly, if only to himself, Pendel still contrives to prevaricate. Perhaps he knows that indecision is the only freedom left to him. Perhaps Uncle B
enny is once more plucking at his sleeve. Or perhaps he has some hazy notion that, according to prisoner’s rights, a man selling his soul is entitled to a period of reflection.
“It’s not a Garbo I’m doing, Andy. It’s a Harry,” he says, bravely rising to his feet and pulling back his shoulders. “I’m afraid that when it comes to life-altering decisions, you’ll find Harry Pendel somewhat of a highly calculating animal.”
It was after eleven when Pendel switched off the engine of his car and coasted to a halt twenty yards below the house in order not to wake the children. Then used both hands to open the front door, one to shove it and one to turn the key. Because if you shoved it first the lock worked smoothly; otherwise it went off like a pistol shot. He went to the kitchen and rinsed his mouth out with Coca-Cola in the hope that it would take away the brandy fumes. Then he undressed in the hall and laid his clothes on the chair before tiptoeing into the bedroom. Louisa had opened both windows, which was how she liked to sleep. Sea air wafted in from the Pacific. Drawing back the sheet, he saw to his surprise that she was naked like himself and wide awake and staring at him.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered, dreading a row that would wake the children.
Reaching out her long arms, she clutched him fiercely against her, and he discovered that her face was sticky with tears.
“Harry, I’m really sorry, I want you to know that. Really, really sorry.” She was kissing him and not letting him kiss her in return. “You’re not to forgive me, Harry, not yet. You’re a good fine man and a fine husband, and you’re earning great, and my father was right, I’m a cold, mean-hearted bitch and I wouldn’t know a kind word if it got up and bit me in the butt.”
It’s too late, he thought as she took him. This is who we should have been before it was too late.
6
Harry Pendel loved his wife and children with an obedience that can only be understood by people who have never belonged to a family themselves, never known what it is to respect a decent father, love a happy mother, or accept them as the natural reward for being born into the world.
The Pendels lived on the top of a hill in a neighbourhood called Bethania, in a fine two-storey modern house with front and back lawns and bougainvillea galore and lovely views down to the sea and the Old City and Punta Paitilla in the distance. Pendel had heard that the hills around were hollow, full of American atom bombs and war rooms, but Louisa said we should all feel safer for them, and Pendel, not wishing to argue with her, said perhaps we should.
The Pendels had a maid to mop the tiled floors and a maid to do the washing and a maid to baby-sit and do the routine shopping and a grizzled black man with white stubble and a straw hat who hacked at the garden, grew whatever came into his head, smoked illegal substances and cadged from the kitchen. For this small army of servants they paid a hundred and forty dollars a week.
When Pendel lay in bed at night it was his secret pleasure to enter the troubled sleep of prison, with his knees drawn up and his chin down and his hands cupped over his ears to keep out the groans of fellow prisoners, then wake himself and establish by cautious reconnaissance that he wasn’t in prison at all but here in Bethania under the charge of a loyal wife who needed and respected him and happy children sleeping just across the corridor, which was a blessing every time, what Uncle Benny called a mitzvah: Hannah his nine-year-old Catholic princess, Mark his eight-year-old rebel Jewish violinist. But while Pendel loved his family with dutiful energy and devotion, he also feared for it and trained himself to regard his happiness as fool’s gold.
When he stood alone on his balcony in the darkness, which was what he liked to do each evening after work, maybe with one of Uncle Benny’s small cigars, and scented the night smells of luscious flowers on the damp air and watched the lights swimming in the rainy mist and glimpsed through fitful clouds the queue of boats at anchor in the mouth of the Canal, the abundance of his good luck instilled in him a keen awareness of its fragility: You know this can’t last, Harry boy, you know the world can blow up in your face, you’ve watched it happen from this very spot, and what it’s done once it can do again whenever it feels like it, so look out.
Then he would stare into the too peaceful city, and very soon the flares and the red and green tracer and the hoarse tattoo of machine guns and the jackhammer rattle of cannons would start to create their own mad daytime in the theatre of his memory, just as they had on that December night in 1989 when the hills blinked and shuddered and huge Spectre gunships flew in unopposed from the sea to punish the mostly wooden slums of El Chorillo—as usual it was the poor who were to blame for everything—bludgeoning the burning hovels at their leisure, then going off to replenish themselves and coming back to bludgeon them again. And probably the attackers never meant it to be that way. Probably they were fine sons and fathers, and all they meant to do was take out Noriega’s comandancia until a couple of shells strayed off course, and a couple more followed. But good intentions in wartime do not easily communicate themselves to the subjects of them, self-restraint passes unnoticed, and the presence of a few fugitive enemy snipers in a poor suburb does not explain its wholesale incineration. It’s not much help saying “We used the minimum force” to terrified people running barefoot for their lives over blood and smashed glass, dragging suitcases and children with them on their way to nowhere. It’s not much help to maintain that the fires were started by vindictive members of Noriega’s Dignity Battalions. Even if they were, why should anyone believe you?
So the screams were soon coming up the hill, and Pendel, who had heard screams in his time and uttered a few, would never have supposed that one human scream would be able to assert itself above the sickening drone of armoured vehicles or the hump-clump of state-of-the-art ordnance, but it really could, particularly when there were a lot of screams together, and they were delivered by the lusty throats of children in terror and accompanied by the porky stink of burning human flesh.
“Harry, come inside. We need you, Harry. Harry, come back from there. Harry, I do not understand what you are doing out there.”
But that was Louisa screaming, Louisa wedged upright in the broom cupboard under the stairs, with her long arched back braced into the joinery for the greater protection of her children: Mark nearly two, who was hugged into her belly, soaking her through his nappy—Mark, like the American soldiers, seemed to have unlimited supplies of ammunition—Hannah kneeling at her feet in her Yogi Bear dressing gown and slippers, praying to somebody she insisted on calling Jovey, who was afterwards perceived to be an amalgam of Jesus, Jehovah, and Jupiter, a sort of divine cocktail run up from the dregs of spiritual folklore that Hannah had assembled in her three years of life.
“They know what they’re doing,” Louisa kept repeating in a high military bark unpleasantly reminiscent of her father’s. “This is not a one-off thing. They have it all figured out. They never, never hit civilians.”
And Pendel, because he loved her, felt it kindest to leave her with her faith, while El Chorillo sobbed and glowed and fell apart under the repeated onslaughts of whatever weaponry the Pentagon needed to try out next.
“Marta lives down there,” he said.
But a woman fearing for her children fears for no one else, so when morning came Pendel took a stroll down the hill and heard a silence that in all his time in Panama City he had never heard before. It was suddenly clear to him that under the terms of the cease-fire, all parties had agreed there would never again be air-conditioning or construction work or digging or dredging; and that all cars, lorries, school buses, taxis, garbage trucks, police cars and ambulances would be henceforth banished from God’s sight forevermore; and that no babies or mothers would be permitted to scream again on pain of death.
Not even the immense and stately column of black smoke rising out of what had once been El Chorillo made the smallest sound as it emptied itself into the morning sky. Only a few malcontents were refusing as usual to recognise the ban, and they were the last remaining shar
pshooters in the compound of the comandancia, who were still potting at American emplacements in the surrounding streets. But soon they too, with a little encouragement from the tanks installed on Ancón Hill, fell silent.
Not even the public telephone in the forecourt of the petrol station was exempt from the self-denying ordinance. It was intact. It was able. But Marta’s number refused to ring.
Clinging defiantly to his newly assumed mantle of Solitary Mature Man Facing a Life Decision, Pendel rode his familiar seesaw of devotion and chronic pessimism with a wildness of indetermination that threatened to unseat him. From the accusing internal voices of Bethania he bolted to the sanctuary of the shop, and from the accusing voices of the shop he bolted to the sanctuary of home, and all in the name of calmly weighing his alternatives. Not for one minute would he allow himself to think—not even in his most self-accusing moments—that he was alternating between two women. You’re rumbled, he told himself, with the triumphalism that seizes us when our worst expectations are fulfilled. Your grandiose visions have come home to roost. Your fabricated world is crashing round your ears and it’s your own stupid fault for building a temple without foundation. But no sooner had he flailed himself with these doomsday predictions than cheering counsel came running to his rescue:
“So a few home truths make a nemesis already”—using Benny’s voice—“when a fine young diplomat is asking you to stand up and be a man for England, you think you’re a doomed corpse in a morgue? Does a nemesis offer to play mad millionaire for you, slip you an inch of fifties in a plain envelope and tell you there’s plenty more where they came from? Call you God’s gift, Harry, which is more than some have done? A classic? A nemesis?”
Then Hannah needed the Great Decider to decide which book she should read for the school reading competition, and Mark needed to play “Lazy Sheep” for him on his new violin so that they could decide whether he was good enough to sit his exam, and Louisa needed his opinion on the latest outrage at the Administration Building so that they could decide what to think about the future of the Canal, although Louisa’s views upon that subject had been decided long ago: the peerless Ernesto Delgado, American-approved straight arrow and Preserver of the Golden Past, was incapable of fault.
The Tailor of Panama Page 9