The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  One of the old lighthouses came into sight.

  “Now why would anybody be such a silly ass as to paint a lighthouse black on one side and white on t’other,” Mr. Osnard asked, having listened endlessly to Hannah on the horrendous appetite of alligators.

  “Hannah, you’re to be respectful to Mr. Osnard now,” Louisa warned when Hannah hooted and told him he was a lemon.

  “Tell her about old Braithwaite, Andy,” Harry suggested grudgingly. “Tell her your childhood memories of him. She’d like that.”

  He’s showing him off to me, she thought. Why’s he doing that?

  But already she was slipping back into the mists of her own childhood, which was what she did whenever they drove to Anytime, an out-of-body experience: back into the deadly predictability of Zonian life from day to day, into the crematorium sweetness bequeathed to us by our dreaming forefathers, nothing left for us to do but drift amid the all-year-round flowers that the Company grows for us and the always-green lawns that the Company mows for us, and swim in the Company pools and hate our beautiful sisters and read the Company newspapers and fantasise about being a perfected society of early American socialists, part settlers, part colonisers, part preachers to the godless natives in the World Beyond the Zone, while never actually rising above our own petty arguments and jealousies, which are the lot of any foreign garrison, never questioning the Company’s assumptions, whether ethnic, sexual or social, never presuming to step outside the confinement allotted to us, but progressing obediently and inexorably, level by level, up and down the tideless narrow avenue of our preordained rut in life, knowing that every lock and lake and gully, every tunnel, robot, dam, and every shaped and ordered hill on either side of them is the immutable achievement of the dead, and that our bounden duty here on earth is to praise God and the Company, steer a straight line between the walls, cultivate our faith and chastity in defiance of our promiscuous sister, masturbate ourselves to death and polish the brass on the Eighth Wonder of Its Day.

  Who gets the houses, Louisa? Who gets the land, swimming pools and tennis courts and hand-clipped hedges and plastic Christmas reindeer, courtesy of the Company? Louisa, Louisa, tell us how to raise revenue, cut costs, milk the gringos’ sacred cow! We want it now, Louisa! Now while we’re in power, now while the foreign bidders are courting us, now before those dewy-eyed ecologists start preaching at us about their precious rain forests.

  Whisperings of payoffs, manoeuvrings, secret deals, echoing down the corridors. The Canal will be modernised, widened to accommodate bigger shipping . . . they are planning new locks . . . multinational contractors are offering huge sums for consultancy, influence, commissions, contracts . . . And meanwhile: new files Louisa isn’t allowed to handle and new bosses who stop talking when she walks into any room except Delgado’s: her poor, decent, honourable Ernesto with his broom, vainly sweeping at the tide of their insatiable greed.

  “I’m too damn young!” she yelled. “I’m too young and too alive to see my childhood trashed before my eyes!”

  She sat up with a jump. Her head must have rolled onto Pendel’s uncollaborative shoulder.

  “What did I say?” she demanded anxiously.

  She had said nothing. It was diplomatic Mr. Osnard from the back who had spoken. In his infinite politeness, he was enquiring whether Louisa enjoyed watching the Panamanians taking over the Canal.

  In Gamboa harbour, Mark showed Mr. Osnard how you got the tarpaulin off the motorboat and started the engine all by yourself. Harry took the helm long enough to navigate the wake of the Canal traffic, but it was Mark who beached the boat and made it fast, unloaded the luggage and, with a lot of help from jolly Mr. Osnard, lit the barbecue.

  Who is this glossy young man, so young, so handsome-ugly, so sensual, so amusing, so polite? What is this sensual man to my husband, and what is my husband to him? Why is this sensual man like a new life for us—although Harry, having foisted him on us, seems to wish he never had? How come he knows so much about us, is so at ease with us, so family, talks so knowledgeably about the shop and Marta and Abraxas and Delgado and all the people in our lives, just because his father was a friend of Mr. Braithwaite?

  Why do I like him so much better than Harry does? He’s Harry’s friend, not mine. Why are my children all over him, while Harry scowls and keeps his back turned and refuses to laugh at Mr. Osnard’s many jokes?

  Her first thought was that Harry was jealous, and that pleased her. Her second thought was at once a nightmare and a terrible, shameful exultation: Oh Jesus, oh mother and father, Harry wants me to fall in love with Mr. Osnard so that we’re even.

  Pendel and Hannah cooking spareribs. Mark preparing fishing rods. Louisa handing out beer and apple juice and watching her childhood chug away between the buoys. Mr. Osnard asking her about Panamanian students—did she know any, were they militant?—and about people who lived the other side of the bridge.

  “Well, we do have the rice farm,” says Louisa winsomely. “But I don’t think we know any people there!”

  Harry and Mark sitting back-to-back on the boat. The fish, to quote Mr. Osnard, giving themselves up in a spirit of voluntary euthanasia. Hannah lying on her tummy in the shade of the Anytime house, ostentatiously turning the expensive pages of the book on ponies that Mr. Osnard has brought her for her birthday. And Louisa, under the influence of his gentle prompting and a secretive slug of vodka, regaling him with the story of her life this far, in the flirtatious language of her whore-sister Emily when she did her Scarlett O’Hara number before falling on her back:

  “My problem—and I have to say this—is it really okay if I call you Andy? I’m Lou—though I love him dearly in so many ways, my problem—and thank God I only have the one, because almost every girl I know in Panama has a problem for every day of the week—my problem has to be my father.”

  10

  Louisa prepared her husband for his pilgrimage to the General in the same way that she got the children ready for Bible school, but with even more enthusiasm. Patches of attractive colour in her cheeks. Speaking with the greatest animation. A good deal of her enthusiasm taken from a bottle.

  “Harry, we must wash the four-track. You are about to dress a modern living hero. The General has more medals for his rank and age than any general in the U.S. Army. Mark, I want you to carry the buckets of hot water. Hannah, you will please take charge of the sponge and detergent, and quit cursing now.”

  Pendel could have run the four-track through the automatic car wash at the local garage, but Louisa needed godliness for the General today as well as cleanliness. She had never been so proud to be American. She said so repeatedly. She was so excited she tripped and almost fell. When they had cleaned the four-track, she checked Pendel’s tie. Checked it the way Auntie Ruth checked Benny’s ties. Close to, then from a distance, like a painting. And she wasn’t satisfied till he’d changed it for something quieter. Her breath smelled strongly of toothpaste. Pendel wondered why she cleaned her teeth so much these days.

  “Harry, you are not so far as I know a co-respondent. It is therefore not appropriate that you resemble a co-respondent when you visit the United States General in charge of Southern Command.” Then in her best Ernie Delgado secretarial voice she rang the hairdresser for a ten o’clock appointment. “No bulges and no sideburns, thank you, José. Mr. Pendel will want it very short and tidy today. He is calling on the United States General in charge of Southern Command.”

  After that she told Pendel who to be:

  “Harry, you will not make jokes, you will be respectful”—fondly pressing down the shoulders of his jacket, though they were perfect as they lay—“and you will give the General my regards, and you will be sure to tell him that all the Pendels and not just Milton Jenning’s daughter are looking forward to the American Families’ Thanksgiving Barbecue and Fireworks Display, the same as every year. And before you leave the shop you give those shoes another polish now. There wasn’t a soldier born who didn’t judge a man by hi
s shoes, and the General in charge of Southern Command is no exception. Drive very carefully, Harry. I mean it.”

  Her strictures were unnecessary. Ascending the zigzag jungle road up Ancón Hill, Pendel as usual meticulously observed the speed restrictions. At the U.S. Army checkpoint he stiffened up and pulled a gritty smile for the sentry, for by then he was halfway to being a soldier himself. Passing the groomed white villas he observed how the stencilled ranks of the occupants rose with him, and experienced a vicarious promotion on his way to heaven. And as he walked up the noble steps to the front door of Number One Quarry Heights he assumed, despite his suitcase, the peculiar American military gait that keeps the upper body on a stately course while hips and knees perform their independent functions.

  But from the moment he stepped inside the house, Harry Pendel was, as always when he came here, hopelessly in love.

  This was not power. This was power’s prize: a proconsul’s palace on a conquered foreign hill, manned by courteous Roman guards.

  “Sir. The General will see you now, sir,” the sergeant informed him, depriving him of his suitcase in a single trained movement.

  The glistening white hall was hung with brass plates for every general who had served here. Pendel greeted them like old friends even while he cast round nervously for unwelcome signs of change. He need not have feared. Some unfortunate glazing of the verandah, some unsightly air conditioners. A few too many carpets. The General at an earlier stage in his career had subdued the Orient. Otherwise the house was much as Teddy Roosevelt might have found it when he came to inspect the progress of the moon shot of its day. Weightless, his own existence irrelevant, Pendel followed the sergeant through connecting halls, drawing rooms, libraries and parlours. Each window was a separate world for him: now the Canal, laden with shipping, winding grandly through the valley basin; now the layered mauve hills of forest, draped with fever mist; now the arches of the Bridge of the Americas bounding like the toils of a great sea monster across the bay, and the three far conical islands suspended from the sky.

  And the birds! The animals! On this very hill—Pendel had learned from one of Louisa’s father’s books—more breeds existed than in all of Europe put together. In the branches of one great oak tree, full-grown iguanas basked and pondered in the midmorning sun. From another, brown-and-white marmosets came spinning down a pole to grab themselves a bit of mango put there by the General’s jolly wife. Then up the pole again, hand over hand, trampling each other for the hell of it as they scampered back to safety. And on the perfect lawn, brown ñeques like great hamsters loped about their business. It was yet another house where Pendel had always wanted to live.

  The sergeant was mounting the stairs, bearing Pendel’s suitcase at the port. Pendel followed him. Old prints of warriors in uniform brandishing their moustaches at him. Recruitment posters demanding his involvement in forgotten wars. In the General’s study, a teak desk so brightly polished that Pendel swore he could see clean through it. But the summit of Pendel’s levitation was the dressing room. Ninety years ago the finest American architectural and military minds had joined forces to create Panama’s first sartorial shrine. In those days the tropics were not kind to gentlemen’s clothes. The best-cut suits could gather mildew in a night. To confine them in small spaces compounded the humidity. Therefore the inventors of the General’s dressing room devised, in place of wardrobes, a tall and airy chapel with upper windows ingeniously positioned to catch each passing breeze. And within it they worked their magic in the form of a great mahogany bar slung from pulleys to raise it to the apex or lower it to ground level. The lightest touch of woman was enough. And to the bar they attached the many day suits, morning coats, dinner jackets, tail suits, ceremonial and dress uniforms of the first general to command the Heights. So that they might hang free and rotate, wafted by zephyrs captured by the windows. In the whole world Pendel knew no more rousing tribute to his art than this.

  “And you preserve it, General, sir! You use it!” he cried with passion. “Which if I may say without disrespect is not what we British commonly associate with our respected American friends.”

  “Well, Harry, we’re none of us quite what we appear, are we?” said the General with innocent contentment as he studied himself in the mirror.

  “No, sir, we are not. Though what will become of all this when it falls into the hands of our gallant Panamanian hosts, I suppose no man can determine,” he added craftily in his role of listening post. “Anarchy and worse is what I hear from some of my more sensationally minded customers.”

  The General was young in spirit and liked frank speaking. “Harry, it’s a yo-yo. Yesterday they wanted us to go because we’re bad colonial bears and they can’t breathe while we’re sitting on their heads. Today they want us to stay because we’re the biggest employer in the country and if Uncle Sam walks out on them they’ll suffer a crisis of confidence on the international money markets. Pack and unpack. Unpack and pack. Feels great, Harry. How’s Louisa?”

  “Thank you, General, Louisa is in the pink and will be all the more so for hearing that you enquired after her.”

  “Milton Jenning was a fine engineer and a decent American. Sad loss to us all.”

  They were trying a three-piece charcoal-grey alpaca, single breasted and priced at five hundred dollars, which was what Pendel had charged his first general a full nine years ago. He took a tuck in the waist. The General was fat-free and had the figure of an athletic god.

  “I expect we’ll be having a Japanese gentleman living up here next,” the listening post lamented, bending the General’s arm at the elbow while they both watched the mirror. “Plus all his family and appendages and cook, I wouldn’t wonder. You wouldn’t think they’d heard of Pearl Harbor, some of them. It depresses me, frankly, General, the way the old order changeth, if you’ll pardon me.”

  The General’s answer, if he ever got as far as thinking of one, was drowned by the joyous intervention of his wife.

  “Harry Pendel, you leave my husband alone this minute,” she protested gaily, sweeping in from nowhere with a great vase of lilies in her arms. “He’s all mine and you don’t alter that suit by one gorgeous stitch. It’s the sexiest thing I ever saw. I’m going to elope with him all over again right now. How’s Louisa?”

  They met in a neon-lit twenty-four-hour café beside the run-down oceanic railway terminus that was now an embarkation point for day trips on the Canal. Osnard sat slumped at a corner table, wearing a Panama hat. An empty glass of something stood at his elbow. In the week since Pendel had last seen him he had put on weight and years.

  “Tea or one o’ these?”

  “I’ll take the tea, please, Andy, if you don’t mind.”

  “Tea,” Osnard told the waitress rudely, passing a hand heavily through his hair. “And another o’ these.”

  “Thick night, then, Andy?”

  “Operational.”

  Through the window they could contemplate the decaying hardware of Panama’s heroic age. Old railway dining cars, the upholstery ripped out of them by rats and vagrants, brass table lamps intact. Rusted steam engines, turntables, carriages, tenders left to rot like the toys of a spoilt child. On the pavement, backpackers huddled under awnings, fought off beggars, counted sodden dollars, tried to decipher Spanish signs. It had been raining most of the morning. It was raining still. The restaurant stank of warm gasoline. Ships’ horns moaned above the din.

  “It’s a chance meeting,” Osnard said, through a suppressed burp. “You were shopping, I was checking boat times.”

  “Whatever was I buying?” Pendel asked, mystified.

  “Fuck do I care?” Osnard took a swig of brandy while Pendel sipped his tea.

  Pendel driving. They had agreed on the four-track because of the CD plates on Osnard’s car. Wayside chapels marking places where spies and other motorists had been killed. Worried ponies with huge burdens driven by patient Indian families with bundles on their heads. A dead cow sprawled at a crossroads.
A swarm of black vultures fighting for the best bits of it. A rear-wheel puncture announced by one deafening round of gunfire. Pendel changing the wheel while Osnard in his Panama hat squatted sullenly on the verge. A roadside restaurant out of town, hardwood tables under plastic awnings, chicken roasting on a barbecue. The rain stopped. Violent sunshine beat on an emerald lawn. Parrots screamed redand-green murder from a bell-shaped aviary. Pendel and Osnard sat alone except for two heavy men in blue shirts at a table the other side of the wooden deck.

  “Know ’em?”

  “No, Andy, I’m pleased to say I don’t.”

  And two glasses o’ house white to wash their chicken down— hang on, make it a bottle, then fuck off and leave us in peace.

  “They’re jumpy is what they are,” Pendel began.

  Osnard had propped his head between the splayed fingers of one hand while he took notes with the other.

  “There’s half a dozen of them round the General all the time, so I’m not getting him alone. There was a colonel there, tall fellow, kept drawing him aside. Getting him to sign things, murmuring in his ear.”

  “See what he signed?” Osnard moved his head slightly to relieve the pain.

  “Not while I’m fitting, Andy.”

  “Catch any murmurs?”

  “No, and I don’t think you’d have caught many either, not while you were down there on your knees.” He took a sip of wine. “ ‘General,’ I said, ‘if it’s not convenient or I’m hearing what I oughtn’t, tell me is all I ask. I’ll not be offended; I’ll come back another day.’ He wouldn’t have it. ‘Harry, you’ll be pleased to stay right here where you belong. You’re a raft of sanity in a stormswept sea.’ ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay.’ Then his wife comes in and nothing is said. But there are looks that are worth a million words, Andy, and this was one of them. What I call a highly meaningful and pregnant look between two people who know each other well.”