The Tailor of Panama

by John le Carré

  “When God invented the sun, Mr. Blüthner, he was wise enough to invent air-conditioning.”

  “And you would like to meet some friends of mine,” says Mr. Blüthner, with a twinkly smile.

  Mr. Blüthner in Colón is several degrees racier than his familiar on the Pacific side.

  “I don’t know why I ever put it off,” says Pendel.

  On other days they would have taken the back stairs to the textiles department, for Pendel to admire the new alpacas. But today it’s the crowded streets they take to, Mr. Blüthner leading at a good snap until, sweating like stevedores, they arrive before an unmarked door. Mr. Blüthner holds a key in his hand, but first he must give Pendel a roguish wink.

  “You don’t mind we sacrifice a virgin, Harry? Tarring and feathering a few schwartzers not going to be a problem to you?”

  “Not if it’s what Benny would have wanted for me, Mr. Blüthner.”

  Having darted a conspiratorial glance up and down the pavement, Mr. Blüthner turns his key and gives the door a vigorous shove. It is a year ago or more, but it is here and now. On the gardenia wall in front of him Pendel sees the same door open, and the same pitch blackness beckon.

  15

  From bouncing sunlight Pendel followed his host into darkest night, lost him and stood still, waiting for his eyes to make the change, smiling in case he could be seen. Whom would he meet, in what weird attire? He sniffed the air but, instead of incense or warm blood, smelled old tobacco smoke and beer. Then gradually the instruments of the torture chamber came floating forward to present themselves: bottles behind a bar, a mirror behind the bottles, an Asian barman of great age, a cream-coloured piano with cavorting girls daubed on its raised lid, wooden fans puttering from the ceiling, a high window and a cord to open it, broken off short. And last, because they gleamed the least, Pendel’s fellow searchers for the Light, dressed, not in zodiacal robes and conical hats, but in the drab fatigues of Panamanian commerce: white short-sleeved shirts, buckled trousers under bricklayer bellies, loosened neckties patterned in red cauliflower.

  Several faces were known to him from the humbler fringes of the Club Unión: Dutch Henk, whose wife had recently bolted to Jamaica with his savings and a Chinese drummer, tiptoeing gravely towards him with a frosted pewter tankard in each hand: “Harry, our Brother, we are proud you have at last arrived among us”—as if Pendel had trekked across the polders to get to him. Olaf, Swedish shipping agent and drunk, with pebble spectacles and a wire-wool hairpiece, yelling in his cherished Oxford accent that wasn’t one: “I say, Brother Harry, old chap, good show, cheers.” Belgian Hugo, self-styled scrap-metal merchant and former Congo hand, offering Pendel “something very special from your old country” out of a shaking silver hip flask.

  No tethered virgins, no bubbling tar barrels or terrified schwartzers: just all the other reasons why Pendel had never joined till now, the same old cast in the same old play, with “What’s your poison, Brother Harry?” and “Let’s fill that up for you, Brother,” and “What took you so long to come to us, Harry?” Until Mr. Blüthner himself, adorned in a Beefeater’s cape and mayoral chain, sounded two hoarse blasts on a dented English hunting horn, and a pair of double doors was kicked open to admit a column of Asian porters with trays above their heads, marching into the room at punishment speed to a chant of “Hold him down, you Zulu warrior,” led by none other than Mr. Blüthner himself, who, as Pendel was beginning to understand, was retrieving certain elements that had gone missing from his early life, such as delinquency in adolescence.

  For having summoned everyone to table, Mr. Blüthner placed himself at the centre of it and Pendel at his side and remained standing happily at attention, as they all did, while Dutch Henk delivered himself of a long, incomprehensible grace, the drift of which being that the company would be even more virtuous than it already was if it ate the food before it—a premise Pendel was inclined to question as he took his first fatal mouthful of the most character-changing curry that had come his way since Benny last whisked him round the corner for a nice touch of Mr. Khan’s while your Auntie Ruth is doing her piety up the Daughters of Zion.

  But no sooner had they sat than Mr. Blüthner bounded to his feet again with two messages that were delightful to the company: our Brother Pendel making his first appearance among us here today— thunderous applause, interspersed with jocular obscenities, the company becoming by now mellow—and allow me to introduce a Brother who needs no introduction, so a big hand, please, for our wandering sage and longtime Servant of the Light, diver of the deep and explorer of the unknown, who has penetrated more dark places—dirty laughter—than any of us round this table today, the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah, freshly returned from a triumphant wreck-raising expedition in the Dutch East Indies, of which some of you will have read. (Cries of “Where?”)

  And Pendel, peering into his gardenia wall, could discover Jonah now as he did a year ago: crouched and cantankerous, with a yellowed complexion and lizard eyes, methodically provisioning his plate with the best of everything before him—red-hot pickles, spiced pappadums and chapattis, chopped chili, nan bread, and an oozing speckled red-brown lumpy substance that Pendel had already privately identified as unrefined napalm. Pendel could hear him too. Jonah, our wandering sage. The gardenia wall’s sound system is faultless, even if Jonah has some difficulty making himself heard above the babel of smutty stories and fatuous toasts.

  The next world war, Jonah was telling them, in thick Australian accents, would be played in Panama, the date had already been set, and you bastards had better bloody believe it.

  The first to challenge this assertion was an emaciated South African engineer named Piet.

  “It’s been done, Jonah, old boy. Little fellow we had here called Operation Just Cause. George Bush waved his wimp factor at us. Thousands dead.”

  Which in turn provoked indistinct enquiries along the lines of “What did you do in the invasion, Daddy?” and responses of an equally intellectual kind.

  Here a firefight of charge and countercharge burst from several quarters at once, to the innocent pleasure of Mr. Blüthner, whose smile switched from one speaker to the next as keenly as if he were following a great tennis match. But Pendel heard little above the clamour of his intestines, and by the time he was restored to partial consciousness, Jonah had turned his attention to the shortcomings of the Canal.

  “Modern shipping can’t use the fucker. Ore containers, supertankers, container ships, are too big for it,” he pronounced. “It’s a dinosaur.”

  Olaf the Swede reminded the company that there was a plan to add more locks. Jonah treated this intelligence with the scorn it obviously deserved.

  “Oh, dead on, squire, great idea. More fucking locks. Fantastic. Incredible. What, I wonder, will science do next? Let’s use the old French cut too, while we’re about it. And take a slice through the Rodman Navy Base. And sometime around 2020, with God’s grace and all the wonders of modernity, we’ll have a very slightly wider Canal, and a much longer transit time. I drink to you, squire. I stand up and raise my glass to progress in the twenty-first fucking century.”

  And probably beyond the smoke Jonah did exactly that, for Pendel, as he watches the replay on the gardenia wall, has a highfidelity memory of Jonah leaping to his feet but remaining exactly the same height until, with exaggerated ceremony, he raises his tankard and ducks his yellowed face into it, lizard eyes and all, so that for a second Pendel wonders whether he will ever surface again, but these divers know their trade.

  “Not that Uncle Sam gives a fart in a thunderstorm whether there’s one fucking lock or six,” Jonah resumed, in the same sawedged tone of infinite contempt. “The more the better, as far as the Yanks are concerned. Our gallant Yanqui friends have given up the Canal for dead long ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of them were all for blowing the bugger up. Why should they want an efficient Canal? They’ve got their fast freight line from San Diego to New York, hav
en’t they? Their dry canal, they’re pleased to call it, run by decent moronic Americans instead of a shower of dagos. The rest of the world can go screw itself. The Canal’s an outdated symbol. Let the other buggers use it—and bullshit to you, you dozy Kraut prick,” he added, to the somnolent Dutch Henk, who had presumed to doubt his wisdom.

  But elsewhere round the table weary heads were lifting, fuddled faces turning towards Jonah’s dubious sun. And Mr. Blüthner, anxious not to miss one gem of repartee, was halfway out of his chair and across the table in his determination to catch Jonah’s every word. The wandering sage was meanwhile rebuffing criticism:

  “No, I am not talking through my fundament, you Mick nipple, I am talking oil, I am talking Jap oil. Oil that was once heavy and has now been made light. I am talking world domination by the yellow man, and the end of fucking civilisation as we know it, even in the Emerald fucking Isle.”

  A wit asked whether Jonah meant the Japs were going to flood the Canal with oil, but he ignored him.

  “The Japanese, my fine friends, were drilling their heavy oil long before they discovered how to use the stuff. They filled up king-sized storage tanks all over the country while their top scientists hunted day and night for a fucking formula to break it down. Well, now they’ve found it, so look out. Slap your hands over your appendages if you can find them, gentlemen, is my advice, and turn your arses to the rising sun before you kiss them goodbye. Because the Nips have found their magic emulsion. Which means that your tenure here in Paradise is scheduled to last about five minutes by the station clock. You pour it in, you shake it all about, and bingo, you’ve got oil like all the other boys. Fucking oceans of it. And once they’ve built their own Panama Canal, which is going to happen in the flick of a very small mayfly’s dick, they will be in the happy position of being able to flood the fucking world with it. To the considerable rage of Uncle Sam.”

  Pause. Growls of confused dissent from different corners of the table, before the literal Olaf deputes himself to ask the obvious question.

  “What are you meaning to say here, please, Jonah?—‘once they have built their own Panama Canal’? Which orifice are you talking out of now, I would like to know, please? The idea of a new canal has been completely belly-up ever since the invasion. Perhaps you spend too much time under the water to hear what is going on upstairs. Before the invasion there existed a very high and intelligent tripartite commission to study alternatives to the Canal, including a new cut. The United States, Japan, and Panama, all were members. Now this commission is completely eliminated. The Americans are very pleased. They did not like the commission at all. They pretended, but they did not like it. They like much better to have things stay as they are, with some new locks, and have their heavy-industry companies administer the terminal ports, which will be very profitable. I know all this, thank you. It is my job. The matter is quite dead. So fuck you.”

  But Jonah, far from crushed, was furiously triumphant.

  Staring at the gardenia wall, Pendel, like Mr. Blüthner, strains himself to catch every word of prophecy that falls from the great man’s lips.

  “Of course they didn’t like the fucking commission, you Nordic pedant! They hated it. And of course they want their own heavyconstruction companies bedded down in Colón and Panama City, administering the terminal ports. Why do you think the Yanks boycotted the commission once they’d joined it? Why do you think they invaded this stupid country in the first place? Pounded it to pieces any which way they could? To stop the naughty General flogging his cocaine to Uncle Sam? Bullshit! They did it to smash the Pan army and screw up the Pan economy so badly that the Japs couldn’t buy the fucking country and build themselves a canal that works for them. Where do the Nips get their aluminium from? You don’t know, so I’ll tell you: Brazil. Where do they get their bauxite? Brazil again. Their clay? Venezuela.” He listed other substances Pendel had never heard of. “Are you telling me the Nips are going to ship their essential industrial materials up to New York and fast-freight them to fucking San Diego, then cart them across to Japan, just because the existing Canal’s become too narrow and too slow for them? Are you telling me they’re going to send their giant oil tankers round the fucking Horn? Pump their new oil across the fucking isthmus, which takes for fucking ever? Sit on their arses while five hundred bucks are slapped on the price of every fucking Jap compact that arrives in Philadelphia because the Canal can’t fucking carry them anymore? Who’s the biggest user of the Canal?”

  Hiatus while a volunteer is looked for.

  “The Yanks,” said somebody bold, and paid the price.

  “Bullshit, Yanks! Haven’t you heard of flags of fucking convenience now sanctified by the delightful and harmless title of Open Registries? Who owns the convenience? The Japs and the Chinese. Which bastard’s going to be building the next generation of Canal-going ships?”

  “The Japs,” someone whispered.

  A shaft of divine sunlight fights its way through the window of Pendel’s cutting room and settles like a white dove on his head. Jonah’s voice becomes sonorous. The fatuous expletives, like unneeded notes, fall away. “Who’s got the best high tech, the cheapest, fastest? Forget the American big boys. It’s the Japs. Who’s got the best heavy machinery, the wiliest negotiators? The best engineering brains, the best skilled labour and organisers?” he is declaiming in Pendel’s ear. “Who dreams night and day of commanding the world’s most prestigious gateway? Whose surveyors and engineers are at this very moment boring for soil samples a thousand feet underneath the estuary of the Caimito River? You think they’ve given up just because the Yanks came in and pasted the place? You think they’re going to kowtow to Uncle Sam, apologise for having had naughty thoughts about dominating world trade? The Japs? You think they’re tearing their kimonos about the ecological mayhem of joining two incompatible oceans that have never been introduced to each other? The Japs, when their own survival’s on the table? You think they’re going to back down because they’ve been told to? The Japs? This isn’t geopolitics, it’s combustion. All we’re doing is sitting here waiting for the bang.”

  Somebody asks diffidently where the Chinese might figure in this scenario, Brother Jonah. It is Olaf again, with his Oxford English undimmed: “I mean, good heavens, Jonah old chap, don’t the Japanese hate the Chinese, and isn’t it a two-way thing, actually? Why should the Chinese stand by while the Japs help themselves to all the power and glory?”

  Jonah in Pendel’s memory is by now nothing but tolerance and sweetness.

  “Because the Chinks want the same as the Japs, Olaf, my good friend. They want expansion. Wealth. Status. Recognition in the councils of the world. Respect for the yellow man. What do the Japs want of the Chinese? you are asking me. Allow me to explain. Firstly, they want them as their neighbours. After that they want them as buyers of Japanese goods. And after that again they want them as a source of cheap labour to manufacture the said goods. The Japs think the Chinks are a subspecies, you see, and the Chinese return the compliment. But for the time being, the Chinks and the Japs are blood brothers, and it is we, Olaf, the deluded round-eyes, who are destined to suck on the hind tit.”

  The rest of what Jonah said that afternoon came to Pendel in garbled text. Not even the gardenia wall was equipped to repair the damage done to his memory by a combination of napalm and alcoholic substances. It took Benny’s ghost, standing at his elbow, to ad-lib the missing message:

  . . . Harry boy, I’ll give it to you straight, and haven’t I always. What we’ve got here is a very large con comparable to the boy who flogged the Eiffel Tower to interested buyers, a five-star plot big enough to send your friend Andy running to his bank manager. No wonder Mickie Abraxas has been keeping shtum for his friends, because it’s dynamite plus he owes them. Harry boy, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you’ve got more fluence in you than Paganini and Gigli together, and all you ever needed was the right bus pulling up at the right stop on the right day and before you knew it
you’d be on your way there, no waiting in the corridor like the rest of us, well this is the bus. We’re talking a quarter-mile-wide, state-of-the-art, Japanese-built, sea-level canal from coast to coast, Harry boy, planned in deepest secrecy while the Yanks are bleating about new locks and having their heavy-industrial mob muscling in on the action, just like the old days except they’re looking at the wrong canal. And the Top Pan lawyers and politicos and Club Unión as usual forming a tightly knit group, up to their elbows in the till and thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam and milking the Japs rotten while they do it. Add in those wily Frogs Andy’s always on at you about, plus a nice touch of your Colombian drug money for sinister, and Harry boy, the Gunpowder Plot isn’t in it, except who’s going to catch you with the matches in your hand this time? Answer: nobody. You’re asking me the price, Harry boy? You’re telling me those Japs can’t afford it? The Japs can’t afford their own canal? How much did Osaka airport cost, then? Thirty billion used ones, Harry boy, is what I am reliably advised. A snip. Know how much a sea-level canal will cost? Three Osaka airports, including legal fees and stamp duty. Harry, it’s the kind of money those boys leave under the plate. Treaties, you ask? Binding obligations on the Pans not to spoil the Canal for Uncle Sam? Harry boy, that was the old Canal. And that’s where the Pans will be depositing their binding obligations.

  The gardenia wall has one last cameo for him.

  Pendel and his host are standing on the doorstep of Mr. Blüthner’s emporium, saying goodbye to one another several times.

  “You know something, Harry?”

  “What’s that, Mr. B.?”

  “That Jonah fellow is the biggest bullshit artist in the world. He knows nothing about orimulsion and even less about Japanese industry. Their dreams of expansion: well, yes, there I agree. The Japanese have always been irrational about the Panama Canal. The problem is, by the time they’re running it, nobody will be using big oceangoing vessels anymore, and nobody will be needing oil because we shall have better, cleaner, cheaper forms of energy. As to those minerals of his”—he shook his head—“if they need them, they’ll find them closer to home.”