The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

“So?”—playful, drawing the boy out.

  “Well, sir, I wondered if one of your friends in the City might get onto Pendel’s bank under a pretext and find out the score.”

  Luxmore is already on the telephone, spare hand thrust down the seam of his trousers.

  “Miriam, dear. Find me Geoff Cavendish. Failing him, Tug. And, Miriam. It’s urgent.”

  It was another four days before Osnard was once more summoned to the presence. Pendel’s wretched bank statements lay about on Luxmore’s desk, courtesy of Ramón Rudd. Luxmore himself was standing stock-still at his window, savouring a moment of history.

  “He’s appropriated his wife’s savings, Andrew. Every penny. Can’t resist usury. They never can. We’ve got him by the short-and-curlies.”

  He waited while Osnard read the figures.

  “A salary’s no good to him, then,” said Osnard, whose grasp on financial matters was a deal more sophisticated than his master’s.

  “Oh. Why not?”

  “It’ll go straight into his bank manager’s pocket. We’re going to have to bankroll him from day one.”

  “How much?”

  Osnard by now had a figure in his mind. He doubled it, knowing the virtue of starting as he meant to continue.

  “My God, Andrew. As much as that?”

  “It could be more, sir,” said Osnard bleakly. “He’s in up to his neck.”

  Luxmore’s gaze turned to the City’s skyline for comfort.

  “Andrew?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mentioned to you that a grand vision has certain components.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One of them is scale. Don’t send me dross. No grapeshot. Not ‘Here, Scottie, take this bag of bones and see what your analysts make of it.’ Do you follow me?”

  “Not quite, sir.”

  “The analysts here are idiots. They don’t make connections. They don’t see shapes forming in the sky. A man reaps as he sows. Do you understand me? A great intelligencer catches history in the act. We can’t expect some little nine-till-five fellow on the third floor who’s worried about his mortgage to catch history in the act. Can we? It takes a man of vision to catch history in the act. Does it not?”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “Don’t let me down, Andrew.”

  “I’ll try not to, sir.”

  But if Luxmore had chanced to turn round at that moment, he would have found to his surprise that Osnard’s demeanour lacked the meekness of his tone. A smile of triumph lit his guileless young face, and sparks of greed his eyes. Packing, selling the car, swearing allegiance to each of half a dozen girlfriends and performing other chores associated with his departure, Andrew Osnard took a step not normally expected of a young Englishman setting out to serve his Queen in foreign climes. Through a distant relative in the West Indies he opened a numbered account on Grand Cayman, having first established that the compliant bank had a branch in Panama City.

  13

  Osnard paid off the clapped-out Pontiac and stepped into the night. The prickly quiet and low lighting reminded him of training school. He was sweating. In this bloody climate he usually was. Underpants nipping at his crotch. Shirt like a wet dishcloth. Hate it. Cars without lights crackled stealthily past him over the wet drive. High cropped hedges provided for extra discretion. It had rained and stopped again. Bag in hand, he crossed a tarmac courtyard. A naked six-foot plastic Venus, lit from somewhere inside her vulva, shed a sickly glow. He stubbed his foot against a plant tub, swore, this time in Spanish, and came upon a row of garages with plastic ribbons dangling over their doorways and a low-powered candle bulb lighting each number. Reaching number 8, he shoved aside the ribbons, groped his way to a red pinlight on the far wall, and pressed it: the fabled pushbutton. A genderless Voice from the Beyond thanked him for his visit.

  “My name’s Colombo. I booked.”

  “You prefer a special room, Señor Colombo?”

  “Prefer the one I booked. Three hours. How much?”

  “You want to change to a special, Señor Colombo? Wild West? Arabian Nights? Tahiti? Fifty dollars more?”

  “No.”

  “One hundred and five dollars, please. Enjoy your stay.”

  “Give me a receipt for three hundred,” Osnard said.

  A buzzer sounded and an illuminated letter box opened at his elbow. He posted one hundred and twenty dollars into its red mouth, which snapped shut. Delay while the notes were passed through a detector, the excess duly noted, the bogus receipt prepared.

  “Come back and see us again, Señor Colombo.”

  A shaft of white light half blinded him, a crimson welcome rug appeared at his feet, an electronic Tudor door clicked open. A fug of disinfectant fumes slapped him like a blast from an oven. An absent band struck up “O Sole Mio.” Sweat pouring off him, he glared round for the air conditioners at the same moment as he heard them crank themselves into action. Pink mirrors on the walls and ceiling. A convocation of Osnards glowering at each other. Mirrored bed head, crimson flock counterpane shimmering under nauseous lighting. Freebie sponge bag containing comb, toothbrush, three French letters, two bars of American milk chocolate. Television screen showing two matrons and a forty-five-year-old Latin man with hair on his arse cavorting naked in somebody’s drawing room. Osnard looked for a switch to turn them off, but the cord ran straight into the wall.

  Jesus. Typical.

  He sat on the bed, opened his shabby briefcase, set out his wares on the bedspread. One sheaf o’ fresh carbon wrapped as locally produced typing paper. Six reels o’ subminiature film concealed in can o’ fly spray. Why do Head Office concealment devices look as if they’ve been bought in Russian governmentsurplus stores? One subminiature tape recorder, undisguised. One bottle Scotch, head joes and their case officers for the use of. Seven thousand bucks in twenties and fifties. Pity to see it go, but think of it as seed money.

  And from his pocket, in all its undestroyed glory, Luxmore’s four-page telegram, which Osnard laid out page by page for easy reading. Then he sat frowning at it with his mouth hanging open, selecting from it, memorising and rejecting simultaneously, the way a Method actor might read his lines: I’ll say this but say it differently, I won’t say that at all, I’ll do this but my way, not his. He heard the rumble of a car pulling into garage number 8. Rising, he tucked the four pages of the telegram back in his pocket and placed himself at the centre of the room. He heard the clunk of a tinny door and thought, Four-track. He heard footsteps approaching and thought, Walks like a bloody waiter, while he tried to listen beyond them for sounds that might not be so friendly. Has Harry sold and told? Has he brought a bunch of heavies to arrest me? Of course he bloody hasn’t, but the trainers said it was wise to wonder, so I’m wondering. A knock at the door: three shorts, one long. Osnard slipped the lock and drew the door back, not all the way. Pendel, standing on the doorstep, clutching a fancy holdall.

  “My goodness me, whatever are they up to, Andy? Reminds me of the Three Tolinos at Bertram Mills Circus when my Uncle Benny used to take me.”

  “Christ’s sake!” Osnard hissed as he bundled him into the room. “You’ve got P & B plastered all over your bloody bag.”

  There was no chair so they sat on the bed. Pendel was wearing a panabrisa. A week ago he had confided to Osnard that panabrisas would be the death of him: cool, smart, and comfortable, Andy, and cost fifty dollars, I don’t know why I bother. Osnard went into the routine. This was no chance encounter between tailor and customer. This was a full-scale, twenty-five-thousand-mile service conducted according to the classic spy-school handbook.

  “Got any problems with being here?”

  “Thank you, Andy, everything is hunky-dory. How about you?”

  “Got any materials that are better in my hands than yours?”

  Groping in a pocket of his panabrisa, Pendel produced the ornamented cigarette lighter, delved again for a coin, unscrewed the base, and shook out a black cylinder which he passed
across the bed.

  “There’s only the twelve on there, Andy, I’m afraid, but I thought you’d better have them all the same. In my day we’d have waited till the film was finished before we took it to the chemist.”

  “Nobody follow you, recognise you? Motorbike? Car? Nobody you didn’t like the look of?”

  Pendel shook his head.

  “What do you do if we’re disturbed?”

  “I leave the explanations to you, Andy. I take my departure at my earliest convenience and I advise my subsources to get their heads down or take a foreign holiday and you wait for me to contact you when normal service is resumed.”

  “How?”

  “The emergency procedure. Call box to call box at the agreed times.”

  Osnard obliged Pendel to recite the agreed times.

  “How about if that doesn’t work?”

  “Well, there’s always the shop, isn’t there, Andy? We are somewhat overdue for a fitting on our tweed jacket, which provides us with a cast-iron excuse. It’s a corker,” he added. “I can always tell a nice jacket when I’ve cut one.”

  “How many letters have you sent me since we last met?”

  “Just the three, Andy. That was all I could manage in the time. Business is coming in you wouldn’t believe. The new clubroom has really tipped the balance, in my opinion.”

  “What were they?”

  “Two invoices and one invitation to a preview of new attractions in the boutique. They came out all right, did they? Because I worry sometimes.”

  “You’re not pressing hard enough. Writing gets lost in the print. You using ballpoint or pencil?”

  “Pencil, Andy, like you told me.”

  Osnard fished in the sump of his briefcase and came up with a plain wood pencil. “Have a go with this next time. Double H. Harder.”

  On the screen, the two women had abandoned their man and were consoling themselves with one another.

  Stores. Osnard handed Pendel the can of fly spray containing spare cassettes of film. Pendel shook it, pressed the top, and grinned when it worked. Pendel expressed anxiety about the shelf life of his carbons, whether they’d lost their fizz or anything, Andy? Osnard handed him a new set anyway and told him to sling whatever he had left of the old lot.

  The network. Osnard needed to hear the progress of each subsource and record it in his notebook. Subsource Sabina, Marta’s star creation and alter ego, dissident politics student with responsibility for the El Chorrillo cadre of secret Maoists, was asking for a new printing press to replace her defunct one. Estimated cost five thousand dollars, or maybe Andy knew where to put his hands on an old one?

  “She buys her own,” Osnard ruled shortly as he wrote down “printing press” and “ten thousand dollars.” “It’s arm’s length all the way. She still think she’s selling her information to the Yanks?”

  “Yes, Andy, until Sebastian tells her different.”

  Sebastian, another Marta construct, was Sabina’s lover, an embittered people’s lawyer and retired anti-Noriega campaigner who, thanks to his impoverished clientele, provided snippets of deep background on such oddities as the underlife of Panama’s Muslim Arab community.

  “What’s with Alpha Beta?” Osnard asked.

  Subsource Beta was Pendel’s own: a member of the Legislative

  Assembly’s Canal Consultative Committee and a part-time dealer in bank accounts looking for respectable homes. Beta’s Aunt Alpha was a secretary in the Panamanian Chamber of Commerce. In Panama everybody has an aunt working somewhere useful.

  “Beta’s up-country, stroking his constituency, Andy, which is why he’s quiet. But he’s got a nice meeting Thursday with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Panama and dinner with the Vice President Friday, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel. And London liked his latest, did they? He sometimes feels he’s not appreciated.”

  “It was okay. Far as it went.”

  “Only Beta did rather wonder whether a bonus might be in order.”

  Osnard seemed to wonder too, for he made a note and scribbled a figure and drew a circle round it.

  “Let you know next time,” he said. “What’s with Marco?”

  “Marco is what I’d call sitting pretty, Andy. We had a night on the town, I’ve met his wife, we’ve walked the dog together and gone to the pictures.”

  “When are you going to pop the question?”

  “Next week, Andy, if I’m in the mood.”

  “Well, be in the mood. Starting salary five hundred a week, subject to review after three months, payable in advance. Bonus o’ five thousand cash when he signs on the dotted line.”

  “For Marco?”

  “For you, you ass,” said Osnard, handing him a glass of Scotch in all the pink mirrors at once.

  Osnard was making the kind of signals that people in authority make when they have something disagreeable to say. A pout of discontent settled over his rubbery features, he scowled at the cavorting acrobats on the television screen.

  “You seem very sunny today,” he began accusingly.

  “Thank you, Andy, and it’s all down to you and London.”

  “Lucky you’ve got the loan, then. Isn’t it? I said, Isn’t it?”

  “Andy, I’m thanking my Maker for it every day, and the thought that I’m working it off puts a spring into my stride. Is there something wrong, then?”

  Osnard had assumed his head-prefect tone, though he had only ever been at the receiving end of it, usually before a beating.

  “Yes. There is, actually. Quite a lot wrong.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I’m afraid London are not quite as pleased with you as you appear to be with yourself.”

  “Why’s that, then, Andy?”

  “Nothing much. Nothing at all, really. They have merely decided that H. Pendel, superspy, is an overpaid, disloyal, grafting, two-faced con artist.”

  Pendel’s smile underwent a slow but total eclipse. His shoulders fell, his hands, which till now had been supporting him on the bed, came obediently to rest at the front of his body, demonstrating to the officer that they meant no harm.

  “Any particular reason at all, Andy? Or was it more the general overview they were taking?”

  “Furthermore, they are not at all pleased with Mr. Mickie bloody Abraxas.”

  Pendel’s head lifted sharply.

  “Why? What’s Mickie done?” he demanded with unexpected spirit—unexpected by himself, that was. “Mickie’s not in this,” he added aggressively.

  “Not in what?”

  “Mickie’s done nothing.”

  “No. He hasn’t. That’s the point. For too bloody long. Apart from graciously accepting ten thousand bucks cash up front as an act of good faith. What have you done? Also nothing. Contemplated Mickie contemplating his navel.” His voice had acquired the saw edge of schoolboy sarcasm. “And what have I done? Credited you with a very handsome bonus for productivity—joke—which, put into plain language, means recruiting a spectacularly unproductive subsource: to wit, one M. Abraxas, slayer of tyrants and champion o’ the common man. London’s having a bloody good laugh about that. Wondering whether the officer in the field—me—is a little too green, and a little too gullible, to mix it with idle, money-grabbing sharks like M. Abraxas and you.”

  Osnard’s tirade had fallen on deaf ears. Instead of druckening himself, Pendel appeared to be enjoying an easing of the body, indicating that whatever he had feared was past, and whatever they were now dealing with was small beer by comparison with his nightmares. His hands returned to his sides, he crossed his legs and settled back against the bed head.

  “So what does London propose to do about him, we wonder, Andy?” he enquired sympathetically.

  Osnard had abandoned his hectoring voice for one of puffy indignation.

  “Bleating about his debts of honour. What about his debt of honour to us? Keeping us dancing on a string—‘can’t tell you today, tell you next month’—getting us all sexed up about a conspi
racy that doesn’t exist, bunch o’ students only he can talk to, bunch o’ fishermen who will only talk to the students, blah blah. Hell does he think he is, for Christ’s sake? Hell does he think we are? Bloody idiots?”

  “It’s his loyalties, Andy. It’s his delicate sources, same as you. All the people he’s got to get the say-so from.”

  “Fuck his loyalties! We’ve been waiting on his precious loyalties for three bloody weeks. If he’s as loyal as all that, he should never have bubbled his movement to you in the first place. But he did. So you’ve got him over a barrel. And in our business, when you’ve got somebody over a barrel, you do something about it. You don’t keep everybody waiting for the answer to the meaning o’ the universe because some altruistic wino derelict needs three weeks to get his friends’ permission to tell it to you.”

  “So what do you do, Andy?” Pendel asked quietly.

  And if Osnard had possessed that kind of ear or heart, he might have recognised in Pendel’s voice the same undertow that had entered it at lunch a few weeks back when the question of recruiting Mickie’s Silent Opposition was first raised.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what you do,” he snapped, once more donning his head-prefect’s gown. “You go to Mr. Bloody Abraxas and you say, ‘Mickie. Hate to break this to you. My mad millionaire chappie isn’t going to wait anymore. So unless you want to go back to the Panamanian slammer whence you came, on charges o’ conspiring with persons unknown to do whatever the fuck you’re conspiring to do, cough up. Because there’s a bag o’ money waiting for you if you do, and a very hard bed in a very small space if you don’t.’ Is that water in that bottle?”

  “Yes, Andy, I do believe it is. And I’m sure you’d like some.”

  Pendel handed him the bottle, provided by the management for the resuscitation of exhausted customers. Osnard drank, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and the neck of the bottle with his podgy forefinger. Then he handed the bottle back to Pendel. But Pendel decided he wasn’t thirsty. He was feeling sick, but it wasn’t the kind of nausea that water cures. It had more to do with his close collegial friendship with his fellow prisoner Abraxas and Osnard’s suggestion that he defile it. And the last thing in the world Pendel wanted to do at that moment was drink from a bottle that was wet with Osnard’s spit.